Artist Notes

  Bonfire Night, St. John's Eve by Jack Butler Yeats (Ireland )   Traditional summer festivals have always revolved around the solstice and bonfires on the feast of St. John (24 June) ...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2024/09/e-decline-of-summer-festivals-how.html

      Killers of the Flower Moon is a recent epic movie set in the 1920s examining a series of murders of members of the Osage Nation, who became wealthy when oil was found on their tr...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2024/08/becoming-backdrop-oppression-of-native.html

 Book Review of Prophet Song by Paul Lynch   Prophet Song: The Secular Apocalypse In his book, How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2024/07/authoritarian-ireland-and-secular.html

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder INTRODUCTION Eleanor Parker writes in her book, Winters in the World, that "in Anglo-Saxon poetry winter is often im...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2024/04/spring-traditions-and-celebrations-past.html

Of all art forms the ballad has the benefit of expediency. From event, to composition, to broadcast: no art form can compete with the efficacy and proliferation of a good song. The reach and emot...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2024/02/ballad.html

  A red bauble on a Christmas tree (a symbol of apples?)   The ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews used evergreen wreaths, garlands, and trees to symbolise their respect for natu...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2024/01/sacred-tree-or-paradise-tree-christmas.html

    Painting by Sliman Mansour "I hugged the olive tree. It was precious to me, so I hugged it. I felt like I was hugging my child. I'd raised the tree like my child. They attacked arou...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/11/art-and-struggle-olive-trees-as-symbols.html

   Snap-Apple Night, painted by Daniel Maclise in 1833, shows people feasting and playing divination games on Halloween in Ireland. It was inspired by a Halloween party he attended in Bl...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-afterlife-trick-or-treat-halloween.html

 “My unlucky countrymen have always had a taste for justice, a taste as inconvenient to them, situated as they always have been, as a fancy for horse-racing would be to a Venetian.” —Thoma...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/10/captain-rock-symbol-of-risen-people.html

  Che (2008 film) directed by Steven Soderbergh.   "Just a short time ago it would have seemed like a Quixotic adventure in the colonised, neocolonised, or even the imperialist nations...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/08/warriors-and-domestics-plotting-new.html

War pony is an extraordinary new film based around two young Lakota boys living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The film shows the difficulties faced by Native Americans surrounded by pover...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/07/life-lessons-on-res-war-pony-2022-movie.html

  The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes' writings on democracy, republicanism and tolera...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-counter-enlightenment-origin-of.html

Title screen for the HBO series , Succession. Review of Succession (contains spoilers) by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin      "In ancient Rome, at one point, they wanted to make all the s...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-art-of-deception-learning-to-speak.html

EXTRAORDINARY ATTORNEY WOO (2022) AND WHITE TIGER (2021)   (Spoiler alert) Book cover of The White Tiger (2008) “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they ...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/03/changing-society-nature-life-and.html

  March 17 is traditionally St Patrick's Day, a day when 'Irishness' is celebrated all over the world. This date is traditionally held to be the date of the death of St Patrick  (c. 385 – ...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/03/every-st-patricks-day-everywhere-all-at.html

Questions From a Worker Who Reads (Bertolt Brecht 1935) Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ? And Babylon...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/03/dubai-superlatives-power-of-excessive.html

A DOCUMENTARY FILM REVIEW   By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin Samira is a young Zanzibari woman who had a big dream. To leave home, have a family and study for a career. In many countries this i...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/02/samiras-dream-ndoto-ya-samira-2022.html

Theatrical release poster A movie review. There will be spoilers.. Pádraic Súilleabháin and Colm Doherty (the fiddle player) are old friends whose meetings are as regular as a clock - l...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-banshees-of-inisherin-2022-parable.html

"When you're in survival mode, you numb yourself." Clemantine Wamariya Frank Berry is an Irish film director and screenwriter who doesn't shy away from exposing the harsh realities of contempora...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2023/01/aisha-2022-despair-and-desperation-in.html

Twelfth Night Revels in the Great Hall (1838) by Joseph Nash, Haddon Hall, Derbyshire, from 'Architecture of the Middle Ages'. The Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) was a well know...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-poem-for-christmas-christmas-revels.html

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature. Zeno The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order. Henry Miller Man...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2022/12/slovenia-ptuj-kurentovanje-celebration.html

  Edmund Burke MP. Portrait by Joshua Reynolds, c. 1769 INTRODUCTION The rapid spread of the science-based Enlightenment (c1687-c1804) across Europe during the seventeenth and eigh...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2022/10/romantic-heroes-ameliorating-dark-side.html

  The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666. "Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the ...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-radical-enlightenment-role-of.html

  A poster of the miniseries Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99. The documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 was most decidedly a depiction of a catastrophe. Watching the concert progress (or regres...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2022/08/woodstock-99-feeling-heat.html

There was a brief moment in time in the 1940s, when the USA was at one with Russia or as it was known then, the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, America entered into the war on the same...

http://gaelart.blogspot.com/2022/08/hollywood-1940s-pro-soviet-movies.html