After The Pause

Between the ages of 13 and 14 I discovered poetry, politics, painting and the blues, more or less in that order. Between them they did for any further consistent attention to school, apart from those teachers who could see where I was at, which meant a French teacher who was a poet, two English teachers and, above all, my art teachers, Michael Markham and Christine Rowe, who gave me the use of the art-room as a refuge. At the age of 16 I left school and went to various art schools in London, from 1965 to 1971, the main one being Chelsea. During that time I was also pursuing my other interests as well, which nearly got me thrown out of Chelsea in my second year for non-attendance (I was concurrently attending music classes in other institutions, this was the 1960s after all and education then was more or less free). For a short time after I left Chelsea I shared an ACME (arts collective) studio in Curtain Street with my friend and co-musician Chris Francis, where I painted. But I was more involved in music and music workshops at the same time, in The Oval House with Maggie Nicols, the jazz and free music singer, who was my first wife, (we organised the Oval Music Festival there for a couple of years) and I played jazz trumpet and wrote music, especially with my group, Voice. I was simultaneously involved in Trotskyist politics (beginning in 1963 when I was 14) and then from about 1973 until 1987 my focus shifted to political activism, an all-consuming passion, as those who have been there will know, which meant I painted very sporadically, although for some of that time I worked as an art teacher. From the mid 1980s my political views were on the move, as I was geographically most of that time and by the time I moved back to live in Dublin again in 1990 (I was there for five years in the late 1970s) I knew that painting was what I should have been doing all along, having started again in London in about 1988. At first I was a lecturer and teacher in schools, art colleges and universities in Dublin - up until 1994 - trying to reduce the hours enough to find the space to make my own work, but it was clear that I would have to stop teaching in order to paint regularly. This I was able to do mainly because of the great understanding of my wife and closest friend, Carol Coulter, Irish Times journalist, legal consultant, writer, cultural critic and political thinker.

My work, from the end of the 1980s (when I was still living in London working in an arts workshop for teenagers but visiting Ireland again) through to about 2002, was derived from travelling in, absorbing and working from, the sea and mountain landscapes of Mayo-Sligo and Wicklow-Wexford. I found the landscape cathartic. This was something that just happened to me and was not an 'ideological' choice. If anything, at the beginning of this period, I would have been trying for a more formalist art, looking back to influences rooted in the post-war American tradition, but the fluid character of what I was seeing in Ireland took me at a deeper level and back to the earlier influences of my teenage years. I think the pieces quoted here, from Terry Eagleton, Niamh O'Sullivan and Declan Kiberd, reflect that focus very well, also picking up on the return to the 'art-led' side of my work, not uncommon in someone from my generation, but which I had 'ideologically over-ruled' because of my Marxist politics. I believe the 'art for art's sake' versus 'art is a social construct' argument to be of little use to artists. Art making is a very complex thing, both individual and social and yet neither exclusively. Why I was motivated to take the shapes, moods and textures of landscape as a basis for painting (as opposed to other possible artforms) and how this might refer to other art are, for me as a practitioner, questions to be answered in the work and not so much in verbal analysis.

The works themselves began moving me to different visual concerns in 2003, with references to more linear structures. While I still sporadically work on the long series of 'mountain and bay' paintings started in the 1980s, I have begun to look at the human face and figure as a motif more recently again as well. As long as I can remember, I have painted in series and what I explore in each work is part of a continuum, but not just one series or one continuum and in the end perhaps not one artform.