My Father's Work Shed: Painting and Poems

In My Father's Work Shed, painter Bart O’Reilly brings together over a decade of poems and paintings that trace the shifting contours of memory, grief, and place. The book moves through personal loss—most notably the death of his parents—with a quiet, painterly sensibility. Childhood recollections and the fading texture of Irish skies anchor the work, even as it explores a present shaped by distance and dislocation.

O’Reilly’s visual language, rooted in the legacy of modernist abstraction, deepens the poetry’s reflection on impermanence. What emerges is a meditation on how images and language intersect—sometimes harmoniously, often unresolved. This is a book that asks you to sit with complexity: a landscape of light, longing, and perception rendered in paint and verse.