A Rose for Times Past I did this one to honour a friend who died too soon, of Motor Neuron Disease. He had acquired a reputation as a homeless stumbling alcoholic. Harmless, but ridiculed in his home town. After he died the coroner's report revealed the disease.
Throughout the latter years of his life I thought he was living in Australia, where he had moved to years earlier. I didn't know he had come back, didn't know he was living rough, didn't know he occasionally sheltered in the local charity place just a few miles away.
Maybe I had passed him on the street, a stumbling wreck, and like so many others must have done, saw him invisible.
The woman in the painting is Rose (her real name), a mutual pal from the old and crazy days of youth. She told me of his death from her home 3000 miles away in New York. And me, only twenty miles away, unaware of the departure of an old friend. So much for the original social networking of smalltown Ireland, huh?