Today’s the day to Bake Bread for Peace. The idea is to fill your home with the aroma of baking sending out peaceful vibes and then sharing your finished produce with family, friends and neighbours. Bread is the staff of life and as such is vital to our survival so what better to do than share it.
Breezy Willow Kelly will be busy in her cottage kitchen making all sorts of loaves including her delicious banana bread. Her friend Susie Hailes Harkin will concentrate on her popular soda loaves and I’ll do some scones to share.
Can you believe Donald Trump and his ilk? Laughing in glee at the tragedy on the film set of Rust. The actor Alec Baldwin apparently poked fun at Trump’s family so the ex-president finds his gross behaviour is justifiable retribution. It must be terrible to in the middle of the shooting that took the life of Halyna Hutchins and injured Joel Souza. No doubt the truth will come out at some time but obviously there has been disquiet amongst the crew who walked of the film due to safety concerns the day before the accident, including gun safety. I immediately thought of my visit to the set of Saving Private Ryan at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. It was an extraordinary experience, the vast British Aerospace airfield was re-designed into the French village of Ramelle.
Half built buildings were fashioned in dry Oasis (usually for flower arrangements) so they would blow apart when the mock explosions went off. Soldiers crawled around with their weapons at the ready, a canon lay abandoned. I was fortunate enought to be the guest of Mark Huffam production manager and the only journalist allowed on the otherwise closed set, welcome as long as I left my notebook and camera at home. As a result the images are seared onto my visual memory, the lifelike dead bodies some without limbs, some without heads, torn apart with bluebottles feeding on the jam like substance smeared on especially to attract them. Any faces on show were those of crew members, masks had been made of those who volunteered so they were totally lifelike except for the terror on the faces and the lacerations. Must have been strange for those who offered up their likeness to then film the carnage. Two American Mustang fighter aircraft skim overhead several times over as the camera tracks so Mr. Spielberg can edit it in such a way that it looks like many more. But one of the most memorable images I have is a large container with elaborate locks on the door. An armourer unlocked and allowed me to go inside for a few moments to see the rows and rows of weapons of all shapes and sizes, guns and hand grenades. It was quite chilling to see, not for live ammunition I was assured but very convincing and very much under control.
A MODEST MAN WITH THE GIFT OF SCULPTING
John Sherlock is an example of a man who made the best of his talent throughout his life. He passed away in June last year and tributes told of a charming man, fizzing with charm and creative energy, a teacher, hotelier and property developer as well as a qualified pilot, master mariner and accomplished musician, he played violin and piano, also trombone and guitar.
He was a Derryman, school was St. Columb’s College at the same time as John Hume and Seamus Heaney and after studying art in Belfast and Liverpool in the early 50s he taught alongside Heaney at St. Thomas’s secondary school and St. Joseph’s teacher training college in West Belfast. Little did he know how fate and fortune would lead to these two men to sit in his studio many years later as he fashioned their likeness in bronze.
A book of his work compiled for his wife Rosemary and son Jonathan by his friend Mike McCann, emphasises how John’s passion for sculpture developed late in life. Although he touched on the medium at art school, indeed as a young student he was invited to make the stags head for the Gates of Glenveagh Castle in Donegal, the commercial world seemed more important at the time, however those days of study and creating were not lost when in his 70s he returned to the studio and began two years of fantastic work. Why did he not gain the recognition he deserved? Mainly because he worked to commission rather than displaying in galleries or at exhibitions.
Working In Bronze.
His first public work which sits outside Lisburn City Council offices is of the renowned cardiologist Professor Frank Pantridge, the man who pioneered the portable defibrillator and mobile coronary care. Perched on a Mourne granite rock he is so lifelike that people often stop in their tracks for a double take.
John’s subjects are many and varied, busts of Hume, Trimble, Heaney, Louis Macneice and Fr. Denis Faul, Mary Peters began her bronze life as a ‘half’ figure on a plinth but as she pointed out to John, she really should have legs as they were instrumental in her winning gold in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Such was her faith in the sculptor that she entrusted him with the original tracksuit and her gold medal.
Harry Ferguson’s historic first powered flight is there for all to see on the main Belfast to Dublin road although there is talk of a re-site of the bronze and stainless steel sculpture to bring it more into public view. This famous Ulsterman fell under John Sherlock’s scalpel again as he leans thoughtfully on a five bar gate with his tractor spanner in hand, so detailed is the face you’d expect him to turn round and invite you into the kitchen for a cup of tea! This was the genius of John Sherlock, his attention to detail, to the expressions, the joy of Mary, the vision in the face of Seamus Heaney, the somber reflective faces of mid 19th century republican radicals John Mitchel and John Martin. Commemorating the Belfast Blitz of April 1941 his mother fleeing a bomb blast pulling her girl child after her highlights that detail, the button which has ripped from the woman’s dress and lies at her feet, the child gripping her teddy bear and the square sets taken from Hill Street used as a paved base. This can be viewed in the Northern Ireland War Memorial building in Talbot Street Belfast.
His sense of humour showed through many times, with the UDR Memorial Monument commissioned by Lisburn City council costing more than £200,000 and taking two years to complete, the figures are ‘heroic-scale” meaning one and a half life size and on one the face may look familiar. It should, it’s actually modelled on film star George Clooney!
His Tribute Garden in Dromara featuring four bronze portraits of former road racing champions from the village draws tourists from all over Europe.
John Sherlock may well have been seen as a gentleman sculptor but he was far from that, a gentleman yes but an inspired professional artist, prolific in his later life and a man to take on any commission he believed in. He worked 12 hour days in his home studio making the clay moulds before casting in bronze usually at the Dublin Bronze Art Foundry. As his works were commission from other countries he became a regular international traveller who was awarded an OBE in 2009 and elected a member of the Royal Ulster Academy.
For details of the book Thanks For All The Craic …! E-mail info@royalulsteracademy.org
The importance of checking against predictive text going badly wrong!
