Helen Pullens Art Zone:

We're delighted to welcome local Wicklow Artist Helen Pullen as Arts editor on the site. Helen will be bringing you local arts information and sharing her thoughts and opinions on the arts in wicklow county. Visit her website: www.helenpullen.blogspot.com for more musings

Christmas...

It’s that time of the year again – Christmas.

Mention Christmas and you get different reactions – mostly good but to me Christmas means -  memories. I remember ……… I grew up in a big old farmhouse with two sisters.

The house was big and rambling and VERY COLD  in the winter, I was around when there was no central heating brrrr! Anyway – this Christmas I must have been around 4 or 5 and my sisters were all around a year or two of my age so Christmas was a very magical time for us.  Come Christmas Eve and all us girls and my dad came down the flu – lovely!

My dad  was quite sick and a very bad patient.  My Mom made up beds for all of us in the drawing room downstairs as we had just had a storm and our electricity had gone. Picture the scene that night as we settled down to sleep………

Because of having no electric light the curtains had been pulled back so that some light could come into the room.  It had snowed during the day and it was a moonlight night and the windows were from floor to ceiling so the light flooded in.

There was a huge fire in the grate and I will always remember watching the mixture of colours on the ceiling, gold from the flames and silvery blue from the light coming in from the windows. Sometime during the night we heard this tapping on the window and woke up to see this figure at the window.

Great excitement!  Father Christmas had come!

Can you imagine! I can still hear my little sister howling when she discovered it was only the doctor!

March 2011

New Beginnings

Well, we have a new Government, if they can agree!

Spring is here and our gardens and hedgerows are beginning to turn green and spring flowers are coming into bloom, it’s a time for hope and renewal.

I always think that this time of year holds such promise for us.  When we meet we greet each other with “lovely day, thank God” and then the conversation turns to the awful winter we had and we talk about the hope that we will have a good Summer.  Then the conversation turns to what is happening in the country and we sigh and again voice the hope that things will grow and improve and we will be given hope by this new Government, that our children and children’s will have a future.

Each time an artist begins a piece of art it is always like starting again – a new beginning and as they work they really do not know how this work will turn out.  No matter how successful and talented the artist they know in all honesty that this work may not turn out exactly like it should.

So here’s hoping that this new Government is honest and humble enough to admit their faults and learn from the past.  That they work for the people and not for themselves.

~ Helen