Mary Farl Powers (1948–1992) American Person, Irish Artist

MARY FARL POWERS (1948–1992) AMERICAN PERSON, IRISH ARTIST KATHERINE ANNE POWERS MARY FARL POWERS (1948–1992): AMERICAN PERSON, IRISH ARTIST 157 figure 1 Mary Farl Powers (1977), photographed by Hugh Powers. (Courtesy of Powers family) I saw you again tonight, in your jump-suit; thin as a rake, your hand moving in such a deliberate arc as you ground a lithographic stone that your hand and the stone blurred into one and your face blurred into the face of your mother, Betty Wahl, who took your failing, ink-stained hand in her failing, ink-stained hand and together you ground down that stone by force of will. from “Incantata” by Paul Muldoon, in memory of Mary Farl Powers MARY FARL POWERS (1948–1992): AMERICAN PERSON, IRISH ARTIST 158 my sister, Mary Farl Powers, who died in 1992, was an influential and innovative printmaker in Ireland (figure 1). She made etchings, lithographs, wood-block prints, and cast paper works. She was a founding member of the Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin, a director of the Graphic Studio, and member of aosdana where she served as a toscaire. In what follows I shall discuss her becoming and being an Irish artist. I should say right here that it is an odd thing for me to write about art at all—as my sister would have been quick to point out—because I cannot understand anything that is not written down. Fortunately, the Powers family was—and, to some extent, still is—made up of heroic letter writers with a strong archival bent. The collected family correspondence and assorted documentary “stuff” is voluminous; and the Mary Farl Powers section, for one, gives an excellent picture of the making of an artist. The correspondence also reveals what is surely a unique intersection of Irish and American life. Few people emigrated from the United States to Ireland in the 1950s as the Powers family did—quite the reverse, in fact. And I cannot think that anyone at all did it as often as we; for, despite the family’s growing population, we carried the project forward four times over the next quarter century—by which, I mean, the family and its earthly goods crossed the Atlantic eight times. I detached myself from this traveling show in 1969, and Mary did so in 1975, when she made Ireland her permanent home. Oddly—or maybe not, given the pull Ireland has on her most distant descendants—in journeying there the first time, we were not going “home” exactly. Our parents were fourth-generation Americans of Irish and German descent, with the latter somewhat predominating— though, to be sure, our father had always gone on about his fine “Norman brow,” inherited, presumably, from the de Paors of Waterford. Mary Farl Powers, born in 1948, a year after me, in St. Cloud, Minnesota , was the second of the five children of J.F. Powers and Betty Wahl Powers, both writers. Mary was a truly beautiful child with huge blue eyes, a froggy mouth, and an astringent nature, one not inclined toward meekness ; her earliest noteworthy act was to bite the hand of a priest. After moving around from this place to that in Minnesota and, finally, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the family—which then consisted of my parents, Mary, and me—moved to Ireland in 1951. The idea was that this move was a leap to a civilized country, to a better place, salutary to the life of the mind, friendly to writers, and free from the yammer and boosterism of post-war U.S.A. We sailed for Ireland from New York on 25 October 1951 aboard the S.S. America. I see that in the Passenger List, a cream-colored, deckle-edged booklet, we are listed as Mr. John Powers, Mrs. John Powers, Miss Catherine Ann Powers, and Miss Mary Powers, all but the last name being wrong. I’m sure my parents made a lot of this sloppiness; that it represented the overfamiliarity, clunkiness, and general obliviousness they thought they were escaping by leaving America. In Ireland things were not so great as had been hoped. The cold of our house in Greystones, County Wicklow, like that...