Colette Sheridan meets an artist with a perceptive viewpoint
Portrait of the artist. American artist E Alana James has lived and found inspiration in Kinsale for the past 25 years
Sitting at her kitchen table drinking strong coffee in a cosy apartment in Kinsale, American digital artist, E Alana James (72) talks about her journey from the US to the county Cork gourmet and sailing town, which has been her home and that of her partner’s for twenty five years. Alana, who creates larger-than-life-sized digital portraits of people in their seventies, eighties, nineties and even into their 100s, was born in California and spent most of her professional life in Denver, Colorado. She has a Bachelor’s degree in fine art from the University of Colorado. She has a master’s degree in non-profit management and a doctorate in educational leadership from Colombia University in New York. Her wide-ranging career has seen her working with children who were early school leavers. She also worked around the plight of homelessness.
She credits Colombia University for teaching her how to do research. “I taught master’s and doctoral students how to get their dissertations done. That was online. I did that here in Kinsale. It was part of my technology business, Doctoralnet which I ran for a decade. I closed it in 2023, thank heavens, just as AI was coming into the world. AI would have dumped my business and it would have been miserable.”
Twenty-five years ago, Alana and her partner, Margie Milenkiewicz were on holiday in Ireland, trying to see the whole country in a week. “We were going from Kilkenny to Dingle in one day; it was crazy but we loved it. When we got to Kerry, I looked at Margie and said ‘I could live here.’ She said: ‘Ok, orchestrate it. I’ll come.’ Those thirty seconds changed my life. Back in the US, I started looking at all the cities in Ireland. I wanted to live by the water.”
A little concerned about an incident in small town Ireland where Alana and Margie dined at a local restaurant that was not recommended by the host of their B&B, Alana learned that not supporting one of the B&B owner’s family restaurants was disloyal.
“We were having breakfast, discussing the restaurant with some other people who’d been there, when the host came in and asked us where we’d eaten. When we told her, I swear to God the room got ten degrees colder. Her displeasure was so strong that I got the chills. So I’m saying to Margie, ‘how big do you think a town needs to be for a lesbian couple like us that won’t cause the local Supermarket to get ten degrees colder?’ We wanted to be safe moving into Ireland which was a Catholic country. But being lesbian was never an issue. The marketing material about Kinsale said what a cosmopolitan place it is. We figured ‘cosmopolitan’ would probably be OK. We visited it in February, the worst time of the year. The daffodils were blooming and the dolphins had come to the inner bay. So it was a sign that we could live in Kinsale.”
The couple have been living in the apartment for two years. Before that, Margie ran it as an Airbnb. Alana and Margie lived nearby in Castlepark before moving into the apartment.
Alana, who has “a gimped leg” uses a walking stick and says she has no worries about having to use a flight of steps to the apartment as the steps have sturdy railings on both sides.
She says she has been an artist since her teens and in the 1970s, wanted to be “a famous artist.” But her brief brush with fame, when she created a quilted art piece made up of underwear that rock star Frank Zappa collected on tour, soured her. The quilt was for Zappa but someone said ‘oh, it’s you who did this’ while looking pointedly over her shoulder. It made Alana feel hollow.
“So I went about my life, doing other things. But I always wanted to come back to art, in a professional sense, because it feeds my inner life like nothing else does.”
Artist with subject and finished portrait
Alana started her Life Story portraits when she was sixty-five, painting and using other art forms in the early days. It was when she turned seventy that she was “struck by how little I knew what the next thirty years were going to be like. All my life, I had known what was coming next. All of a sudden, I’m seventy and don’t know how to manage it, or what other people my age are doing. That’s when I decided to start doing portraits (which include interviews) of people aged seventy-five and over.” Being au fait with technology, Alana’s portraits – that include key aspects of the subjects’ lives – are digital. The subjects, usually nominated for portraits by their adult children, send Alana a photograph of themselves which she blows up with the largest works measuring 6ft x 4.5ft. They also give her photographs of the important elements of their lives, usually family members and friends, allowing Alana to make a collage. Alana felt something more could be added to the portraits so she creates abstract art as a backdrop to them.
She uses an iPad, a graphic App called Procreate, while having ‘conversations’ on her multiple monitors with AI, generating abstractions to capture feelings. The components are dropped into a film editing suite where, through animation, they engage the viewer differently.
Alana, who exhibited some of her portraits at Gallery 23 in Kinsale earlier this year, is very proud of her work which helps her on her own journey. The portraits are also part of her research into growing old in Ireland. She cites one woman whose portrait she captured.
“This woman was a physical therapist. She died recently. At the funeral, everybody was talking about how every day she was still doing her exercises until she died. You have people who maybe have had a few serious hits in their lives. Three of the people I studied for portraits, had experienced elder abuse and two were abused as children. These are people who have suffered and who have been resilient. People find them inspirational.”
The work, while hugely personal to the subjects, is all part of Alana’s inquiry into the latter years of life’s trajectory and the reality of ageing in this country.
“First and foremost, it is personal research. But it has broadened. Ireland has some really good things going on for the ageing population. We have Age Friendly Ireland and Age and Opportunity. I’m a member of the active retired group here in Kinsale. So the basis of this art work has made me keenly aware that isolation is the biggest challenge that older people face.”
Alana believes the Irish government is “pushing very hard” to keep older people in their homes rather than in nursing homes. She and Margie recently participated in the Age Friendly home grant programme. “They came out and looked at our place and saw what we would need in order to stay here. The government provides a partial grant which is means tested.”
Not having family here to fall back on, Alana feels it’s her responsibility and that of Margie, to be “interwoven in our community so that we’re not alone at home all the time. We will get older. None of us gets out of here alive.” She teaches water-aerobics in Acton’s Hotel in Kinsale where her oldest pupil is in her mid-eighties.
Alana hopes to live until 108. “I had an intuitive moment when I was thirty-six that I had lived one third of my life. I don’t know if this is going to happen but I’d better treat it like it is going to happen so I can be who I want to be at 108.”
The subjects of the portraits agree to allow them to be shown in the public realm. They are created free of charge. If a subject wants to buy the portrait of themselves and their life, the fee is €950.
instagram: @ealanajames
