Writing the Self while Painting Enlli – The Island of the Saints: Tide-Race by Brenda Chamberlain
Writing the Self while Painting Enlli – The Island of the Saints: Tide-Race by Brenda Chamberlain

Summary/Abstract: The Welsh painter, poet and writer, Brenda Chamberlain (1912-1971), whose centenary was celebrated in 2012, was an outstanding artist and writer and inspiring personality. Between 1947 and 1961 she decided to live on the Island of the “20 000” saints, Bardsey Island, whose Welsh name is Ynys Enlli, and which lies off the Welsh Llyn Peninsula. As a result of her hermitic life, together with the few islanders who lived across the Enlli Sound which isolates the island even more because of its boiling waters, she painted and wrote a diary, entitled Tide-Race (Seren Books, 1966, 2007). The book recorded the days and nights spent on the island, in which her body adapted to the wild conditions of wind, rain, specific light, freedom, and natural holiness challenged by both man and nature, while her mind identified with the wild seals and the birds on the island in an almost mythical manner. In the view of the symbolical value of the island, as presented by Jean-Jacques Wunenburger in his book, La vie des images (The Life of Images), (Presse Universitaire de Strasbourg, 1995), more specifically the chapter Island Reveries, we shall analyse the diary Tide-Race and the position of a modern female artist who chooses to confront her human existence with that of a holy island marked both by pilgrims, birds and waters, and whose life seems to have been written against the painting of the island and every-day life while the conclusion formulated is a human one: “Though tomorrow may be nothing to me, I nothing to tomorrow, today is mine.” (Brenda Chamberlain, Tide-Race)

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