In Balbriggan, a weekly meet-up for artists that’s “like a warm hug”

It’s a welcome retreat into creativity, says Elaine Gaffney. “It’s like a warm hug.”

“Did you say it’s like a warm drug?” says Tina Poole, beside her. She momentarily puts down the lavender paper she was embroidering with light blue, navy and white threads.

In The Warehouse arts and community space in Balbriggan on Sunday at a little after 1pm, nine people had gathered for the weekly meet-up Sketchbound.

Some chatted happily, others were immersed in sketch pads clutching pens, pencils or sticks of charcoal.

A weekly meet-up for artists, Sketchbound has been running on and off for 12 years.

It was conceived as a meet-up group for people to spend a couple of hours working on an idea or honing their art, says Alison O’Grady, a multidisciplinary artist and teacher. 

“We’ll cross-check with each other, and inform each other,” she says.

“And get jealous,” said Gaffney, a long-time regular, who today was reimagining in black-pen a photo of rocks in Skerries, one resembling a human heart with aorta and arteries.

From Balbriggan to Bahrain and back

Over two hours, O’Grady went around the table. She commented on each of the works as they filled out.

She quietly debated the work of the 20th-century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, with a woman using one of his atmospheric depictions of a tree as a reference point for her own charcoal sketch of a sparse foggy forest.

Born in Balbriggan, O’Grady had formed the group in her hometown after moving from Mallow in Cork to Drogheda in Louth in 2012.

She had been teaching art down in Mallow, but felt that she hadn’t much time to develop her own practice, she says. “I just thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice for people to sketch themselves.”

“I wanted to do my own sketches, keep my sketchbook going,” she says, as she works on a pastel image of a starling.

She always tries to remind attendees that they aren’t coming for a class, she says. This is a far more casual place to create.

At first, they met in Molly’s Coffee Gallery, a neighbouring cafe, she says. “And people from all walks of life started to come.” 

“There would be collaborations, and their drawings became better because they were drawing regularly,” she says.

In 2014, the group had a hiatus in Balbriggan. O’Grady moved to the United Arab Emirates and onwards to Bahrain, she says. “But I brought it with me, and it went international.”

She held meet-ups there, collaborating with writers and artists, she says. “In a community arts studio in Dubai, when there were visiting dancers, I incorporated Sketchbound in to do live-action drawing.”

In 2022, after returning home, she started the group back up in Balbriggan, she says, this time in The Warehouse.

Own ideas

Most artists arrive with their own ideas, she says. “They’ll come with a project maybe they’ve been doing for a while.”

O’Grady also sometimes offers prompts and sets an egg timer. “Which is quite fun, because it helps people to loosen up.”

Nobody, on Sunday, lacked inspiration.

Susan Abahazy was painting a psychedelic portrait of her cat Priscilla.

She grew up in Michigan in a family of photographers, she says. “My father would say, ‘Why would you paint, if you can take a picture?’”

She studied photography herself and was inclined to agree, she says. If she is to paint, it makes sense to dive into her imagination, says Abahazy.

She leafs through a large sketchpad, with iterations of her cat’s head – some painted, others composed of circles in heavy pencil.

Caitlin Moran, a relative newcomer, had been working on a painting of a boat down in Balbriggan’s harbour. 

She switched to a series of seagulls midway through the session, drawn to a gull that noisily strutted about on the corrugated roof overhead.

Reminiscing over rhubarb

Around the corner on Bridge Street, Molly’s Coffee Gallery was officially closed for the day.

But when the week’s meet-up wrapped up at 3pm, O’Grady and Gaffney walked across the street, where they were greeted by the owner, J.J. Walls, at the front door.

Walls opened his cafe in 2011, he says. “It was during the crash, and by the time 2012 came around, things in the town had gotten worse.”

It had been ideal that O’Grady was looking for a place to sketch over the weekends, he says. “Saturday afternoons was always quiet.”

He would insist on opening for them on Sundays, O’Grady says. “But we had to insist, no you’re closed Sundays. We’ll do Saturdays.”

They would settle in the upstairs seating area just after lunch weekly, O’Grady says, as she and Gaffney went up, followed by Walls, who brought a few cups of coffee and slices of rhubarb cake.

Hanging on the walls were two of the earliest pieces that O’Grady had produced during the sessions: detailed pencil sketches of a chair and a coffee cup, dated November 2012.

Three people came to that first meeting, she says. “It was quite relaxed, and it just grew.”

She wanted to provide people a safe place for them to sketch, she says. “It was a place where they could get back to doing what they loved once upon a time, I suppose.”

“And it became this community, to sketch, chat, or simply to hear people talk,” she says.