The Ballydehob Arts Museum (BAM) opened its 2025 exhibition recently where this year, the Museum celebrates the lives and work of two of Ballydehob’s most influential former residents, Naomi Brandel and Marc Brandel.
Marc (originally Marcus Beresford) was born in London in March 1919. At 18, while working as a clapper boy at Ealing studios in London, he met a US actor who took him to New York.
He spent much of the rest of his life in the US.
He wrote his first novel Rain Before Seven, published in 1945 to great acclaim, while in the US Merchant Marines.
Over the next 15 years, he lived in the creative hub of Greenwich Village New York, where he wrote many other novels including The Choice and The Time of the Fire, an allegory about McCarthyism.
He was friends with many American artists and writers of the time including James Baldwin and Gore Vidal.
He was lifelong friends with Patricia Highsmith, to whom he was briefly engaged, although she was a lesbian.
In the 1950s, he began working in early television in Los Angeles as a screenplay writer.
He married Ruda Podemska in 1956, and they had one daughter, Antonia.
In 1961, while working as one of the many writers on Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, he met Naomi Primrose through a mutual friend.
Naomi was born in Glasgow in 1940, but spent much of her childhood in London.
Until she was 18, she studied music and art with distinctions in both, and though she very much wanted to go to art school, her parents decided she should go to secretarial school.
The couple lived in Los Angeles, and Marc was then offered work with Granada television in England, writing a series of screenplays that focused on current events of the 1960s, such as the black civil rights movement in the US.
That prompted a move to West Cork in 1962, buying a ruin and five acres of land in Cappaghglass, Ballydehob in 1963.
Over the next 15 year in West Cork, Marc wrote seven more books including the children’s book The Mine of Lost Days set in West Cork and illustrated by John Verling, as well as numerous screenplays, including Escape from Colditz and Fantasy Island. They had two daughters, Tara and Shaena.
Naomi began painting the Cappaghglass landscape in acrylics. She studied sculpture and painting, and with the support of many local West Cork potters and ceramicists, especially Pat Connor, she began to develop her ceramic sculptures. Her ceramic work was exhibited at the RDS, where she was awarded distinctions in 1977 and 1978, and she had her first solo exhibition at the Cork Craftsman’s Guild in 1979.
Nell and Julia Levis in Ballydehob took Naomi and Marc under their wing, and when Tara was born in 1967, Naomi asked Nell and Julia to be Tara’s godmothers. As more artists began to arrive in the area, Naomi and Marc became good friends with many of them, especially Christa Reichel and Norah Golden, and John and Noelle Verling.
With the breakup of Naomi and Marc’s relationship in 1978, he moved back to Los Angeles, where he married his third wife, Czechoslovakian Edith Votava.
They lived in Mexico, and then in Los Angeles where he died in November 1994.
In 1982, Naomi and her daughters moved to England where Naomi trained as an art therapist.
She returned to live in West Cork in 1994 and continued to work on her sculptures, bringing the techniques she had learned as an art therapist around plant observation into her ceramic work and paintings. She also wrote a novel, After Trelawny which was published in 2008.
Naomi now lives in Stroud in England with her husband, the painter Michael Williams, and she continues to paint and sculpt.
The museum is delighted that Naomi travelled to Ballydehob for the opening of the exhibition in early May.
Speaking ahead of the opening, Naomi said that she was ‘honoured’ that the Ballydehob Arts Museum ‘has chosen to mark both my work and Marc’s this summer in the village, that inspired much of our work at the time that we lived here’.
‘Being among the very first artists to settle in Ballydehob in the early 1960s, we saw the creative community here develop and thrive.
I never imagined that my journey would come full circle in such a beautiful way.’
The exhibition opened during the May Bank Holiday weekend to coincide with the Ballydehob Jazz Festival, then closed, and will reopen during the Summer months. BAM is located in the former AIB building on the village’s Main Street.
It was established in 2018 and showcases works of art, craft and literature produced across West Cork for more than 50 years, including present-day activities.
