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286 VITRUVIANA SEAMUS HEANEY For Felim Egan In the deep pool at Portstewart, I waded in Up to the chest, then stood there half on show Like Vitruvian man, both legs apart, Both arms out buoyant to the fingertips, Oxter-cogged on water. My head was light, My backbone plumb, my boy-nipples bisected And tickled by the steel-zip cold meniscus. * On the hard scrabble of the Junior football pitch Where Leo Day, the college “drillie,” bounced And counted and kept us all in line In front of the wooden horse—“One! Two! In! Out!”— We upped and downed and scissored arms and legs And spread ourselves on the wind’s cross, felt our palms As tautly strung as Francis of Assisi’s In Giotto’s mural, where angelic neon Zaps the ping-palmed saint with the stigmata. * On Sandymount Strand I can connect Some bits and pieces. My seaside whirligig, The cardinal points. The grey matter of sand And sky. And the light playing a blinder For a man out there close to the vanishing point, Taking and giving bearings, marking the spot. VITRUVIANA 287 FELIM EGAN: A CATALOGUE NOTE FELIM EGAN: A CATALOGUE NOTE* SEAMUS HEANEY felim egan is attracted to the vanishing point, the far-out place where the visible and the invisible meet. One part of his artistic being is in love with geometry, with the symmetrical ideal represented by Leonardo’s diagram of Vitruvian man; but another part of him is all eyes for what is actually there in front of him. No wonder he lives in a house that faces Sandymount Strand—a far-out place in all senses, at once an abstract dream and the solid, sandy shore of Dublin Bay. The textures and pigments of his canvases have the same kind of doubleness : the painted surface can suggest cloud-cover, the boil of cumulus over a horizon, but equally it can make you see the grit and swirl of sand, the very down-to-earthness of the strand itself. While it seems to be the soul of abstraction, this art has palpable body (plate 11). When I think of Felim Egan’s work, or rather of the intelligence behind it, I think of the lantern room at the top of a lighthouse, a place full of prisms and reflections, precise lines and symmetries, a Euclidean system; but then too I see something different, a seascape, the offing veiled in the mist, the withheld commingling with the revealed, the actual scene that I can contemplate from the top window of my house on Strand Road—a scene where the far-out solitary figure might just be the artist himself. *from Felim Egan. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, cat. no. 835 (SMA Cahiers 18). Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man (1487). Pen and ink. Gallaria dell’Accedemia, Venice. ...

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