A new documentary telling the story of the life of London- Irish artist, Bernard Canavan was screened at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith recently. Bernard spoke to the Irish World about the film recently.
Bernard was taken from his biological mother and father immediately after he was born and dumped into Saint Patrick’s Guild, an Orphanage in Dublin, run by the Sisters of Charity.
Neglected there for three and a half years, Bernard was rescued when a 47- year- old woman then chose to raise him as her only son.
Issues of displaced family and the vice- like grip the Catholic Church held Irish society in for so long feature in Bernard’s first ever series of paintings to be exhibited in Dublin, Theocracy.
Theocracy is also the name of the documentary that an audience including Ambassador Martin Fraser and his wife Deirdre saw in a rough cut from, followed by a Q and A.
It reflects Bernard’s own story but also seeks to speak for all of the thousands of voiceless victims who suffered abuse at the hands of Ireland’s Catholic Church.
However, more funds are needed to complete the film. To raise funds there is going to be an auction of paintings, including one of Bernard’s own, that have been kindly donated by their owners to raise funds for the Theocracy campaign. The digital auction continues until the end of next month.
Bernard Canavan told The Irish World after the screening: “It’s extraordinary.
“Normally I paint in silence.
“There was a lot of lot of searching questions that were interesting, that I did find of interest, that I probably will paint more pictures out of.”
Asked if the process has been emotional Bernard said: “It’s highly emotional, highly emotional.
“But I am a stoical kind of person.
“I’ve had to live a stoical life because of my beginnings, and so it brings me up short sometimes but I learn a lot from it.
“I’m still learning from it.
“One of the great injustices done to any child is to take away their parents so they don’t know who they are.
“All these things still haunt one.
“These are the ghosts that we all have to live with.”
Asked what it means to be the emigrant’s artist, Bernard said: “I’m also an ordinary guy as well, I’m not that important.
“I thought I should try and do something for these people by painting their image and that’s what I’ve done.
“Whatever you think of my work, that’s all it can be.”
Referring to Ireland’s dark past Bernard said: “I think maybe we can think and reflect about ourselves a bit more so that we don’t commit these kinds of atrocities again.
“They are doing terrible things now in Israel, shocking things, things that you’d never expect anybody who’s an Israeli, a proud Israeli, ever to do.
“It’s terrible.
“I have learned a lot.
“I hope other people might learn something from my pictures.”
Film director Sé Merry Doyle told The Irish World: “Lots of London Irish talk to me about their stories but they’d never seen it on the screen, certainly not in a documentary.
“There’s a kind of a negativity towards even wanting to hear what’s happening to all those people who left there.
“It’s not that big an interest to them.
“this film is a document from here and we’re hoping it’s going back like a letter or something that will land in Dublin.
“And it will generate an argument or a dialogue that has been absent.”
Rosalind Scanlon, Artistic Director of the Irish Cultural Centre and who features in the film, added: “It does reflect the London Irish experience.
“The reason he painted the immigrants is because he was one himself.
“He was a navvy, he did dig roads. He did dig tunnels. He did work with his hands and his muscles like all the Irish men did that came over in the 50s and 60s.
“He came over with his father in the 50s and they both worked in saw mills. They dug roads. They dug the soil in London to build things.
“That’s why it’s poignant. His paintings come from his own personal experience and that’s why they’re so powerful and you’ll see many of them in this film.
“It’s extraordinary.
“It’s a universal story but also to let people in Ireland know, to remind them that the immigrants kept Ireland afloat with all that money going home in letters in the 60s and 70s.
“I remember my dad putting a fiver in a letter to granny and sending it to off to Donegal, his mother.
“Ireland was so poor at that time and all those five pound notes that people put in those envelopes kept Ireland afloat.
“He’s looking at how the church and the state treated these children in mother and babies homes and in orphanages.
“It’s a vital story to tell and the reason why it’s vital is because Bernard is not bitter.
“He’s not turned in on himself.
“He’s not angry.
“He sees himself as a documentarian that has to document this on behalf of all those who were in those places, these institutions, men, little boys and girls that were in the institutions that had had not got their voice.
“Many of them did not survive.
“He’s being a voice for all of them.
“He’s saying, ‘We were treated unjustly. We were treated badly and these stories have to come out in the open’.”
The online auction of the paintings The Ate-In House by Bernard Canavan, What A Wonderful Night For A Moondance by Maire Gartland, Portrait of James Joyce by Anne Boulting and The Threatening Storm by Thomas McCullough. You can make a bid by emailing scanlonwriter@gmail.com.