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Billy Merwick
Quietly Abroad
Re-discovering
Billy Merwick - Life’s constant wanderings from the known to the
unknown
Having
recently found myself released from the time burdens of managing a publishing
company, and faced with the disastrous destruction of the company’s
archives in the February 2002 floods at the East Wall Crosbie Business
Centre, I have begun to look at the books I published over the past twenty
seven years, searching perhaps for a purpose to it all, or perhaps out of
sheer nostalgia and delightful idleness.
The first title I published was Proverbs
& Sayings of Ireland compiled and translated by a friend, Sean
Gaffney, and myself. It was Sean who had come up with the imprint name,
Wolfhound Press, for the company. At the time we felt that the book needed
some illustration or decoration. Not knowing any ‘real’ artist who
just might do the task for nothing, we fall back on our own unlikely
resources. Among our flatmates was one Billy Merwick, newly resigned
– bravely and recklesly – from a safe permanent civil service job, still
without work and driven by a need for freedom and self-expression.
The highest graphic achievement he had managed to-date - apart from
providing a driven, lively and ever entertainingly erratic nucleus for our
fairly innocent 1970s socialising and bartending - was to paint with
decorative symbols the empty beer bottles that littered our flat after
weekend parties – usually concluding late morning with Billy still leading
the chorus with some dramatic banjo playing.
I think the idea was vaguely to try sell
the painted bottles Rodney Danker style on the pavements market in South King Street
opposite the Gaiety. But that never happened.
We persuaded Billy to doodle up some
similar illustrations for the fledgling book of proverbs - which he did
overnight. The book did make publication – being Wolfhound Press’ first
book – still in print! That illustrated edition remaining in print for two
decades. The reviewers were enthusiastic over these imaginative neo-celtic
indian-ink drawings. I wish now I had kept some of these bottles,
alas they have gone the way of the world - to oblivion.
But Billy has not. He lives quietly
abroad - working in his Brussels
studio, where he had been making and exhibiting paintings and sculptures
for the past twenty-five plus years.
When Billy first found himself in Brussels it was with an education theatre company, and
he contributed in addition to a natural theatrical exuberance and
spontaneity, banjo, tin-whistle and fiddle playing, learned in childhood in
Bandon, and nourished through ad-hoc performances in pub and flat in
1960s and 1970s Dublin
suburbs from Rathmines to Ranelagh and back again!
Billy was for ever drunk on the traditional
music of Ireland and Brittany, and
nomadic by nature and inclination, he blended together numerous and
unlikely friendships. To walk into town – a cool pastime of the era for
those of us living in the outer city strip – from Ranelagh and drift
up O’Connell Street
in Billy’s company was to repeatedly encounter mates of his in passing, his
name shouted across streets or from pub and shop doorways as we passed;
every shout was a conversation halt.
Then as we all settled into the world of
work, he departed for music, theatre and art in Europe, with occasional
forays further afield to Canada
and the US.
represent life’s constant
wanderings from the known to the unknown
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