In 2015, I took part in an Art Educator’s Residency at Cow House Studios, located in southeastern Ireland.  Co-director Frank Abruzzese, along with three year Michael, picked me up at my hotel in Enniscorthy, where they had been to the farmer’s market and done some grocery shopping.  Flats of strawberries and six-packs of flowers, gardening tools, flower pots, and boxes of groceries were re-arranged in the back of his jeep to hold my luggage.  Michael eyed me shyly from the back seat as we drove past patchwork-like fields of vivid green, populated by sheep and divided by hedgerows of bright yellow gorse.  We pulled up a long curving farm lane protected by stone walls that supported moss, ferns, and lichens and entered an enclosed gravel courtyard surrounding an old farmhouse.  Frank's wife and co-director, Rosie O’Gorman, warmly greeted me and I felt an instant friendship form.  She and Frank have transformed several former cow sheds on her family’s 180-acre, ancestral farm into contemporary studios and comfortable living quarters for artists.  Cow House Studios, in County Wexford, is still a family affair, as Rosie’s parents occupy the farmhouse and several of her sisters live just down the lane.  Together with Rosie and Frank, they contribute to the congenial, creative sense of place.

Two years later I returned with four students, a colleague, and a former student.  Alighting from the bus that had met us at Dublin Airport that morning, I took in my first breath of the farm and hugged Rosie, standing closest to me.  It was wonderful to see her and Frank again.  Michael, now five and much more talkative, had a new baby brother Emmet, who won everyone’s hearts immediately.  My students were in Ireland as part of my global studies art class, Visual Response, at Home and Abroad, seeking possible answers to an essential question: “How do artists respond visually to an environment, place, or space that is new to them?” Following visits to a variety of sites closer to home, they have been developing methods of response through-out the semester in preparation for their time at Cow House.  Abby, a former student of mine, had shared her own art making practices with the girls and was able to make the trip with us.  She, my colleague Joy and I are each graciously given a studio space from which we can create as well as monitor the kids’ progress.  The girls and Abby settle into a routine of sleeping-in until our shared breakfast each morning, while I appeared downstairs in pajamas early each morning to make coffee for myself and Joy before setting out on walks before breakfast.  On one of these journeys, I learned from Rosie’s dad that he has just retired from farming and sold off most of his herd, which accounted for the empty fields.  After years of farming, he welcomed retirement and an opportunity to travel.

The rhythm of our days together unfolded and we all got to work.  Our time in the studio was precious, and work slowly accumulated on tables and walls. Under Rosie and Frank’s guidance, the girls were presented with a series of interesting prompts designed to hone their observational and conceptual skills. Each of them began the semester with a specific skill-set, e.g., drawing, painting, or photography, but along the way discovered other ways in which she could express an idea. Making art in response to an environment or space presented some challenges which encouraged students to think more deliberately about how they might find inspiration from something that they might have found too demanding, or boring, or even over-stimulating. A camera supported each of them in their process of discovery, compelling them to examine something more closely in order to excavate visual information. Mid-week, Rosie escorted us to Dublin for a full day of exploring galleries and museums featuring Ireland’s rich history, a bit of shopping, and a visit to artist Kathy Tynan’s studio, who engaged us in conversations about contemporary art-making practices. Another morning, we got a private tour of the inner workings of the Cushendale Woolen Mill in Graiguenamanagh and in near-by St Mullins, we walked among the ruins of a monastery and climbed a Norman motte.  The River Barrow flowed alongside these villages, its grassy banks dotted with pink-blossoming cherry trees.  Rosie and Frank each made informal presentations of their own work to us and, well-fed by recently-hired cook Caitriona, our group thrived at Cow House.  In this green land, I decided to respond to the myriad shades of this color, Joy focused on various objects and places around the farm, and Abby captured the ever-changing clouds as they passed overhead in compositions framed by a skylight.  Each girl created a handmade book reflecting her observations and creative problem-solving solutions around thematic ideas presented at Cow House. Joined in the studios most days by Michael, I asked him to teach me some Irish.  In my sketchbook, he wrote the phonetic spelling of words he was learning at school, which Rosie re-spelled in Irish: fearná (ferns); milsean (sweets);baile (town); báinne (milk); bo (cow); glás (green).  Emmet smiled angelically at the girls, who adored him.  We celebrated Easter family-style over a long dinner table that included Caitriona, Rosie’s parents, her sisters and brothers-in-law and all of their children.  It was one of the many highlights of our week.

The beauty of the area surrounding the studios was difficult to capture in words or even photos.  It is a place that slowly reveals its secrets to anyone willing to walk, listen and observe.  Birds, horses, cows and sheep speak incessantly and George, the peacock, can be heard cawing at a great distance.  A babbling brook trills loudly through the quiet, deep fir woods, is captured in a silent, man-made pond and eventually bursts raucously forth further down the hill, spilling over rocks and onto “River Lane.” A bathtub, pressed into service as a drinking trough, temporarily holds the brook before it overflows again and continues past a woodland copse and rocky ravine filled with ferns.  The brook then carves its way past neighboring fields before running under the ancient stone bridge on its journey to the next village. Spring was literally bursting forth in Ireland, with fiddleheads unfurling, pale yellow primroses pushing up through thick hedgerows, and baby lambs frolicking in nearby pastures.  Nature provided any number of symphonies and landscapes and the clouds and sky changed every fifteen minutes, from dark and threatening with rain, to brilliant sunshine. The girls came away with wonderful work, which they presented at our school’s global symposium with great enthusiasm. I wanted to bottle our shared experiences and store it away, to uncork at a later date.  We all had a lump in our throats as we boarded the bus that took us away from Cow House on our last day.