DOLORES - ART

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Dolores left us on 7 May 2016, and though I had known her only a bare two years I miss her. She was a lovely lady, the most serene and open I have met. Though it's now a little past her second anniversary, it seems appropriate to celebrate an aspect of her life - her art.

If I'm to be brutally honest, I must admit that this was drafted for the anniversary but got lost in my drafts. As you'll see below, it's not the first time that family's art "went astray".

Dolores's interest in painting did not surprise me, though I only found out about it after she had gone.

She would have done art at school, Santa Sabina in Sutton, and her father would have encouraged her interest at home.

Were it not for the hand of fate, she would have attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (now NCAD) like her father and aunt before her.

Her father was Gordon Brewster, an RHA exhibited artist and the chief cartoonist with Independent Newspapers. Outside of his official duties he would draw copiously for his children.

Sadly he died suddenly in 1946, when Dolores was only 17, and his estranged wife came back over from England to sort out his affairs and "to claim the children".

That was the end of Dolores's art for for the moment.

In fact it was also the end of Gordon's fine art, most if not all of which went up in smoke in the back garden.

Although she helped her own children with their colouring when they were young, Dolores didn't turn to the painting until later in life when she had more leisure and joined an art group, with which she stayed until the end.

What you see above are just a tiny few examples of her paintings.

I love the colours, but, of course, there are those around me who secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, seem to think I'm sort of colour blind. But no matter.

Sadly, around the turn of the millennium, Dolores's sight began to fail and she retreated to the black and white pencil drawing which she could only do with great difficulty.

I don't know what inspired the man with the creel of turf. Perhaps it was from Wicklow or the West of Ireland. It's unlikely to have been from Howth or Sutton, which is where Dolores lived up to the time she went to England. It may have just been from her imagination.

I was very taken with this one, not for its artistic merits but for what it evokes. I was never at the Raheny trotting but was always conscious of passing the grounds on the train to and from Howth which is where I spent the first four years of my life.

Dolores Brewster-Scott
1929 - 2016

Dolores Brewster RIP

Dolores Brewster
Photo: Johnny Bambury
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I met Dolores Brewster (m. Scott) for the first time in March 2013. I have only met her on two occasions since, but I feel I've known her all my life. There are probably two reasons for that.

In the first place, she was a very special lady. In her mid-eighties she was the most positive, optimistic and serene person I have met. And she was very open, would talk about anything without any side to her. To know her was to like her.

The second reason is that the family connection goes back some seventy years when her father, Gordon, died suddenly in my mother's shop when Dolores was just seventeen. At our first meeting we spoke about that and shared memories of Howth, though mine were from slightly later as I was only two at that time.

Dolores was born in 1929 and the family lived in Howth. Her brother Richard was born two years later and it was in that same year, 1931, that another big family event occurred.

Now that Dolores is no longer with us, and beyond the long arm of the law, I can reveal that she burned the house down. How do I know? She told me so. It was not any childish fit of pique, however. She was only two at the time and it appears she knocked over a clothes horse full of drying clothes straight into the fire and the place went up.

Some time later her parents' marriage broke up. Her mother went to England and Dolores and her brother Richard were raised by their father until his untimely death in 1946. Their mother came back briefly from England to sort out Gordon's affairs and, as Dolores put it, "to claim the children". Then they all went back to England. Dolores went into nursing and her brother into the Merchant Navy.

The children had a great relationship with their father and Dolores, and her daughter Lynne, have come back on occasions to visit his grave in Kilbarrack. It was on one such visit that I first met Dolores, in fact three generations of Brewsters including her daughter Lynne, and her grand-daughter Lottie aged three.

I wish I had met Dolores much earlier and we might have shared a lot more stuff, but I was thrilled to bits when she made it over to attend a talk I gave on Gordon in November 2014.

Strange to say, after such a short acquaintance, I'll miss her.

She died at home last Saturday, peacefully and in the company of her two daughters, Lynne and Micki.

May she rest in peace.

Dolores & myself at the launch of Michael Laffan's
"Judging W T Cosgrave" in October 2014
Photo: Johnny Bambury