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Local artists[edit]
One of the major figures of the Irish Renaissance, Liam O'Flaherty, was born in Gort na gCapall, Inishmore, on 28 August 1896. Máirtín Ó Díreáin, one of the most eminent poets in the Irish language, was also from Inishmore. Since 2000, Áras Éanna Arts Centre, Inisheer, has been welcoming artists in residence, both local and international, to stay and work on the inspirational Aran Islands for periods of one month. Clíodhna Lyons, born on the islands, is an Irish cartoonist, animator, and printmaker, who has created several comics and 'zines and is now a director for Brown Bag Films.
Visiting artists[edit]
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View of Inishmore coastline.
The islands have historically attracted a number of artists. For example, starting in 1908, Harry Clarke spent a number of weeks each summer for six years on Inisheer, accompanied by friends and his future wife, Margaret Clarke (artist). Sketches by and of Clarke exist from these trips, regarded as formative in his upbringing, as they marked the first occasions in which convalescing off the mainland of Ireland was necessary for the artist.[citation needed]
The cultural and physical history of the islands has made them the object of visits by a variety of writers. For example, Lady Gregory came to Aran in the late 19th century to learn Irish. At the start of the 20th century and throughout his life, Seán Keating spent time painting on the islands every year. Elizabeth Rivers also moved from London and lived in Aran, where she created two books of art and was herself visited by artists such as Basil Rakoczi.
A further, related, kind of visitor was those who attempted to collect and catalogue the stories and folklore of the island, treating it as a kind of societal "time capsule" of an earlier stage of Irish culture.[citation needed] Visits of this kind include that captured in Robert J. Flaherty's 1934 classic documentary Man of Aran. The film's depiction of man's courage and repudiation of the intellect appealed to Germany's Nazi party, who noticed it during the Berlin Festival in 1935.[citation needed]
John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands is a work that straddles these first two modes, being both a personal account and also an attempt at preserving information about the pre- (or il-) literate Aran culture in literary form.[citation needed] The motivations of these visitors are exemplified by W. B. Yeats' advice to Synge: "Go to the Aran Islands, and find a life that has never been expressed in literature."
In the second half of the 20th century, until perhaps the early 1970s, a third kind of visitor came to the islands. They came not necessarily because of the uniquely "Irish" nature of the island community, but simply because the accidents of geography and history conspired to produce a society that some found intriguing or even beguiling, and they wished to participate in it directly.[citation needed] At no time was there a single "Aran" culture; any description is necessarily incomplete and can be said to apply completely only to "parts" of the island at certain points in time. Visitors who came and stayed, though, were mainly attracted to aspects of Aran culture such as its reliance on local oral tradition for entertainment and news, isolation, reliance on subsistence or near-subsistence, farming and fishing.[citation needed]
For these reasons, the Aran Islands were "decoupled" from cultural developments that were at the same time radically changing other parts of Ireland and Western Europe. Though visitors of this third kind understood that the culture they encountered was intimately connected to that of Ireland, they were not particularly inclined to interpret their experiences as those of "Irishness". Instead, they looked directly towards ways in which their time on the islands put them in touch with more general truths about life and human relations, and they often took pains to live "as an islander", eschewing help from friends and family at home. Indeed, because of the difficult conditions they found—dangerous weather, scarce food—they sometimes had little time to investigate the culture in the more detached manner of earlier visitors. Their writings are often of a more personal nature, being concerned with understanding the author's self as much as the culture around him.[original research?]
This third mode of being in Aran died out in the late 1970s due in part to the increased tourist traffic and in part to technological improvements made to the island, that relegated the above aspects to history. A literary product of this third kind of visitor is An Aran Keening, by Andrew McNeillie, who spent a year on Aran in 1968. Another, Pádraig Ó Síocháin, a Dublin author and lawyer, learning to speak Irish to the fluency of an islander, became inextricably linked to the Aran handknitters and their Aran sweaters, extensively promoting their popularity and sale around the world for nearly forty years.
A fourth kind of visitor to the islands, still evident today, comes for spiritual reasons often connected to an appreciation for Celtic Christianity or more modern New Age beliefs, the former of which finds sites and landscapes of importance on the islands.[citation needed]
Finally, many thousands of visitors come for broadly touristic reasons, to see the ruins, hear Irish spoken (and Irish music played) in the few pubs on the island, and to experience the geology of cliffs.[citation needed] Some of these visitors create "travelogues" of note.[citation needed] Examples include Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1995), and his accompanying detailed map of the islands.[citation needed]
