Mary’s vibrant art finds a fan in film star Carey

One of Mary Cahalan Lee’s earliest memories is rummaging around her dad’s old trunk for his black and white history magazines and then sketching some of the faces they revealed.

The family’s 400-year-old farmhouse in Lackafinna outside Loughrea overlooked the ruins of a castle and the home became a pitstop for tourists in search of historical remains.

Her father would point to the pencil sketches proudly displayed in the kitchen and urge the visitors to look at Mary’s work.

“It was like my first gallery. They were really good detailed drawings,” she smiles.

Things have come full circle.

She now paints in the attic of their home on the Dyke Road overlooking the ruins of Menlo Castle, which has been converted into a studio. Strewn with dozens of half finished canvasses, photography books and photos, she has three easels on the go there at any one time.

Back then she could not decide what career path to follow. The middle child of Tom and Gertie, she was surrounded by creativity on both sides of the family, she recalls.

There were poets and painters on her mother’s side, musicians on her father’s. Her dad played fiddle and her parents were avid ballroom dancers.

Torn between art and nursing, Mary decided to go and do both.

She studied graphic design in Athlone Institute of Technology, ceramics in the National College of Art and Design and later nursing in Galway.

After graduating as a nurse, the 25-year-old was about to leave for Romania to work in an orphanage when fate intervened.

She was on a date at the Oyster Ball in the Ardilaun. The couple went downstairs to the bar where a wedding party was getting in the mood.

David Lee’s sister was getting married and he was there with a girlfriend.

“Our eyes met. We didn’t even chat. The next night we saw each other again at Central Park and started talking. We met for breakfast but went our separate ways. I went off to Romania and when I returned we met by chance. That was that. We’ve been together ever since.”

David was key to her decision to becoming a full-time artist.

She was working in St Joseph’s Hospital in Clonsilla, Dublin, with adults with special needs. There she helped set up a computer department which encouraged the residents to express themselves through colours and other methods of non-verbal communication.

“I created a project which involved making cards and selling them. We videoed them doing their own thing to show it was them doing the work, not the nurses.

“As a group we had an exhibition based on the theme of the flower, representing how people grow in an institution. We had it in the American Embassy where Jean Kennedy Smith was ambassador.  It was amazing really.  I was very much into the idea that even if your limb is falling off, you’re still coming,” she recalls.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.