Writers, they say, are a breed apart: a strange race given to drink and queer habits as with Brendan Behan or Dylan Thomas. Artists of course, usually fall, or rather collapse into, the same territory, so it is a refreshing change to come across one who seems almost normal (that is, for an artist).

J B Vallely, who naturally is called Brian – since when is life logical? – is a tall, broad shouldered, seemingly unassuming man, reeking of good health, solid vitamins, and the physical ease of the sportsman that he actually was (Fig 2). Rather cleverly he contrives to give one the initial impression that the art is an afterthought to his social life of athletics and music making - he is, after all, a piper. Like many big men he moves quietly and talks softly.
He was born in Armagh and still lives there with Eithne, his Donegal-born wife of thirty-four years. Shortly after they got married, she found herself in a rather challenging situation: the Troubles; the birth of their first son, followed by the painter’s imprisonment; problems over internment necessitating his living in Dundalk for a prolonged period; and then long years during which he exhibited little and her teaching supported him. It has taken them the best part of forty years to achieve comfortable circumstances.

Like all petits maîtres he has quarried away within a particular circumscribed world, in his case that of musicians and sportsmen, and has made it his own. You need to be on a waiting list to get one of his paintings now. You’ll not find him in most of the Irish art histories emanating from the South, but then again you’ll not find most of the key Northerners there either. What you will find is a solid phalanx of collectors and an auction market that is rapidly realising his worth.

The house with a substantial, not to say enormous terrace, is beside his studio, which is in the adjoining substantial terrace house. So the artist has studio, exhibition space, office and so forth in one building, and an elegant living space in the other. The house contains amongst other things, a library, an entire room full of historical paintings of pipers, and enough art to equip a small museum, including a very fine Blackshaw that I’d rather like to steal and – for a painter – a surprising number of very fine sculptures, ranging from Behan to Mulholland. His own work is everywhere.

In the studio there are three easels, each with paintings being worked on. Another two paintings rest on, respectively, a small table and on two paint tins atop a larger table. There are also two tables with paint tubes in serried rows. Some of them are massive. Brushes are in tins, there is the usual paraphernalia of turps, stacks of canvases turned to the wall, and, on the floor, a carpet has been turned the wrong way up and is now rather effectively decorated with paint splashes. It’s a neat studio, with something of the craftsman’s attachment to a careful, orderly sequencing of tools. Again, unusually, he talks in complete sentences, with a quiet, unhurried rhythmic pulse. He sits securely on a simple chair with a countryman’s economy of movement. Not unlike one of his paintings.

BMcA: Brian (J B), you were born in Armagh in 1941 but your mother was from County Mayo and both of your parents were teachers. So we have North and South, town and country, and possibly the hard craft grind of traditional schooling. So what elements from your childhood contributed to your art?
J B Vallely: Probably, in a sense, the biggest influence (and this is not just the wisdom of hindsight) was the primary school where my father taught me. I do have vivid memories of his illustrations on the blackboard. He illustrated all of his classes but had an especial interest in botany: wild flowers and all of their constituent parts. He always had a sketchbook and we always did art in the school, even though there was no real provision for it. I just took it as normal!

There was always a consciousness of being interested in image making. With regard to my father I was lucky enough, in recent years, to come across a whole collection of the notebooks, which he used for classes, each one full of drawings that he used for them. I also found his sketchbooks. I sort of remember, even though I knew nothing of art then, that I had an idea of wanting to be an artist. Then, the next phase I suppose, was a leap forward to my secondary school, St Patrick’s College. I did art all the way through, with a travelling teacher, Willie Elliot, who was from Belfast. He painted landscape in a rich Vlaminck style and lived up the Antrim Road in Belfast. When I’d visit him later, the most recent painting would be set out on the sideboard. But he hardly ever exhibited. I’ve tried to track down his work. But he’s dead now – and I was out of Belfast by 1961…

At Saint Pat’s art wasn’t part of the curriculum after years one and two, so the art class was after school. It was widely accepted then that people who did art were the ultimate skivers. What really moved me on was that, at a certain stage, my father was friendly with another art teacher called Peter McGirr who was at the local tech. I went along too and Mr McGirr introduced me to oil painting. He also mentioned art school to me, so I fixed my sights on this wonderful place, much to the horror of my mother. To get in you had to do an entrance exam, and a scholarship was at the discretion of the local educational authority.

I wasn’t a good academic student… At my interview – having had appalling marks at A level – there was an amazing man called Mr McCord who was on the panel, and who intervened to give me a scholarship. His daughter has since set up a bursary in his name. I launched it, and presented the first awards. I could have gone in any direction really but for a few lucky coincidences: my father, Peter McGirr, Mr McCord…

In hindsight, I think of my mother, who was an extremely intelligent woman, very creative, who was interesting in writing, read a lot, had a university career, and was involved with the Gaelic Society at UCD. She knew Frank Ryan who went to the Spanish Civil War and she had definite ideas about Irish language and Irish culture. In those days, once you married, that was the end of a lot of women’s independent creative lives. I increasingly feel that my mother missed out. She was a great influence on us.

I debated everything with her. She probably wasn’t overly enthusiastic about me doing art but she was a great supporter. After she died, I discovered that she had kept a scrapbook of all of my activities… and then, of course, we had a life in Mayo where I spent every summer. I still have a lot of connections with the West of Ireland… the connection is very important to me... first cousins… a whole music background there. My mother’s family were musical: fiddlers, flute and accordian players. Another cousin was a great classical pianist and teacher. I didn’t really study music when I was young, though I was sent to piano lessons. Music, though, was less overt on my father’s side.

BMcA: When I look at your work I’m reminded of Northern (rather than Southern) writers, particularly short story writers like Michael McLaverty (a story like The Game Cock) or Sam Hanna Bell, not to mention early Northern Irish artists like William Conor. Does this make sense to you?
J B Vallely: It does, but the funny thing is that it must be an instinctive thing. I met Conor and was at his studio when I was a student. And I had some second-hand contact with McLaverty as my father and he were students together at Strawberry Hill, in London, during the late 1920s, and his name frequently cropped up in our house. I later met his son Kevin through a shared interest in piping.

In a way, I always liked Conor’s work but in Belfast in the 1950s and 1960s, opportunities to see his work were few and far between. I knew Dillon, Campbell and Armstrong quite well. They’d given up on here [the North] and went to Dublin. My generation came along as things were starting to change. I got a few leg-ups from the Young Irish Artist Foundation, and also from the Butlin’s prize. I won a few awards….

At art school Tom Carr and John Luke were lecturing along with Kenneth Webb, and Romeo Togood. Colin Middleton was somewhere around. None of these artists had any profile or recognition as painters…. John Luke helped me. He gave me a book called The Power of Positive Thinking and he said to me: ‘If you really want to, you can fly!’ In hindsight the Belfast College of Art had amazing people, but an appalling administration and political direction. John Warwick, the principal, was a political appointee…
.
I can’t pinpoint how I came to agree with myself on my subject matter. There was an early interest in ancient Irish literature: Douglas Hyde’s Literary History was my bible. At one stage I wanted to be a writer! Then there was a point when I changed from the idea of recreating the world of mythology to representing ideas which were in my head, and which were about the here and now: traditional musicians doing their daily business. It happened at some stage when I was in Edinburgh. There was a big period of religious influence in my work as well though not in any logical, coherent or planned way.

BMcA: Considering your interest in the political, how come, in relation to the Troubles (Fig 7), that so little of Northern Irish politics has seeped into your work?
J B Vallely: I’ve often asked myself that question. At times I’ve been under a certain amount of pressure to do something. Then I realised that my involvement in politics was personal: a good few years of fraught existence here, returning to years of constant police and army harassment, a brief time in jail, on the run from internment. Our activity was civil rights orientated but the Civil Rights Movement and the People’s Democracy people were interned. I was out of the country when they came. My brother escaped by jumping out of a window. Unless I could do a Goya! I still have notions on grand themes but it would be too self- conscious. Too near the knuckle. I couldn’t distance myself enough. Confrontation and Soldiers were casual mixed media or gouache works belonging more to reportage…

BMcA: You went to Edinburgh Art College rather than to Belfast. Why ? What kind of teaching did you get then, and do you think that your heightened sense of colour has anything to do with the Scottish Colourists?
J B Vallely: Recently I met up with a guy who’d been to art school with me, the painter John Bellamy. I loved Edinburgh. He was out to do the devil and all, and was critical of everything in Edinburgh. His favourite expression was ‘we’re taking on the world’. Despite, or maybe because of that, we got on well together, and still do. Why I went there is hard to say. I had a major falling out with James Warwick in my second year at Belfast and never went back for classes, though I was allowed to sit my exams and present my final display of work. I’d had a studio with Denis McBride and Bob Sloan, and had heard people like the sculptor Ann Davey, and the architect Harry Orr talking about Edinburgh. So I applied, got an interview, and despite a negative reference from Warwick, I got a scholarship. It was a happy accident. Edinburgh was a painting-oriented art school. One did one’s own thing, and it was full of practising artists. The colour thing I’m not sure about. My colour – more the absence of colour – was monochrome within a limited range (Figs 6 & 8), up to recent years, but now I feel more freedom. For me Emil Nolde, Kokoschka and Soutine were my heroes as a student. Robert Phillipson, then head of painting, was a great fan of Kokoschka.

There was a huge difference between Glasgow and Edinburgh at that time. In Glasgow everything was brown and grey and black. Edinburgh was more flambuoyant. I painted very differently from the Edinburgh way then: Elizabeth Blackadder, Anne Redpath and Chagall were the big influences. And I was also doing monumental religious and mythological paintings, which were very much in monochrome. I won all of the major awards, and one of my paintings still hangs in the college.
When I was at Belfast I was working towards a craft certificate, doing life drawings and bits of sculpture. I drew every bit of Belfast: the shipyards, the docks, Great Victoria Street Railway Station, and the linen mill machinery, now all completely gone from Belfast. Then I selected drawing, painting and printmaking (Fig 3). You were more or less on your own.
In Edinburgh which was run on old studio lines with a special teaching system, there was a course of study: you were allowed black and white and one colour with which to do a still life. There was also a rigorous anatomical course in which you started work with a skeleton and then ‘worked out’, using sheets of thin transparent paper. I missed that, coming in at the stage where you go into the studio, with someone for still life, composition and so on. Philipson and his assistant would storm in, flambuoyant in painting smocks, and make comments.

There was a general air of excitement as the painting studios were very focused, and you could fantasise about Paris. It was great crack as there was a very diverse crowd of people: mature students who had done National Service; different nationalities such as Americans, Poles and Germans; and a wide range of Scots, right up to the Shetlands and the Highlands. It was a very rich milieu and one you didn’t have in Belfast. As entry to Belfast was controlled by unelected bodies of local worthies on the Education Boards, the working class were largely excluded, whereas Edinburgh operated its own awards system

BMcA: Morandi paints versions of the same still-life. You paint versions of Irish musicians and race meetings, not unlike the world of the earlier Blackshaw. Irish music lends itself to improvisation. Do you feel the same about painting?
J B Vallely: It’s very interesting that you mention Morandi. In 1960 in Rome I went to a huge exhibition of his paintings…you see all painters, like all musicians at a certain stage, will answer that everything they do is totally original and uninfluenced by anyone – and I’m as guilty as anyone.

My main preoccupation when painting? Well, if I’m not interested in the subject in a visual way then I can’t do it (Figs 1&3 ). There are lots of things that I think about: the Palestinian/Israeli question, Iraq, Afghanistan… I wish I was Goya!… But for me it has to be something I’m interested in on a different level. Whether I’m expressing the rhythms in music is a matter of speculation. Traditional music is the art of composition. It’s not a rigid formula. It’s the same tune but continually changing, so I don’t get tired of painting musicians. Someone once said that sixty per cent of my painting was of musicians…. I live a fairly isolated artistic life. For socialising I’m involved with athletics, orienteering and music sessions. Art doesn’t come into my social life.

In terms of improvisation it’s difficult to say. Sometimes I associate a tune with a musician. When people transcribe a tune they do a ‘skeleton’. A classical musician won’t play it anything like it really should sound, but a traditional musician will. He interprets the tune as he goes along. It’s the opposite of classical music. How does that relate to painting? I don’t know if I do think like that! I used to play music in the studio but not any more. There is something of the music in the paintings. They’re rarely specific portraits…

BMcA: Is there an analogy with specific rhythms and time signatures?
J B Vallely: When I’m painting I’m reacting to things that are happening on the canvas. For the travelling piper paintings I posed myself in front of a mirror to find the balance of the instruments. Usually I invent in the studio. For specific details I go and get the musical instrument. I do have an image of how musicians hold themselves, and I do continually go to sessions but it’s mostly memory.
However I don’t do preparatory drawings unless it’s for the very big paintings, and then for the sole purpose of knowing where you are! I find it inhibiting to do too much… generally the drawings and watercolours are an end in themselves, and for me it’s all, or nothing. I’m doing a series of very specific paintings at the minute but generally I never know where a painting is going to take me, otherwise there’s no sense of excitement. It all has to happen on the canvas. Every painting is a bit of an adventure. If that stopped, I’d lose interest – so I can’t really do commissions. The images in my head are always far ahead of what I am currently doing, so I always have everything to paint for…

BMcA: Even as early as the 1960s you have always been regarded as being outside the mainstream of ‘modern’ art but possessing an identifiable ‘style’. What is your attitude to ‘modern’ art and why do you think you have a recognisable style which has changed little over the years?
J B Vallely: I can certainly recognise my paintings, but the way I’m painting now is very different from my earlier work. It’s a lot freer. In the past I was more precise, with a limited colour range earlier on. Recently I saw paintings of mine from the early 1960s and realised that I had changed the way I paint. There is, however, a recognisable thread. I always thought that I was a very modern and contemporary painter! An awful lot of what I call academic art (officially approved art) such as Performance Art, Installation, Hard Edge, Conceptual Art and so forth, I don’t see as art at all. Some of the Neo-Expressionists had worthwhile things.
If I go to an art gallery or museum, I walk quickly past some, but stop at others. I never get tired of Giotto at Assisi, or Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection, or the Van Gogh Museum or the Picasso Museum in Paris. An awful lot of art now – Turner Prize art – really and truly is a scam. None of it will be here in a hundred years’ time or even less. I can’t see how conceptual art fulfils any criteria. It’s commercially driven.

There’s a certain amount of pressure, a huge emphasis, on innovation but it’s always been there in art. Rembrandt did it against the grain. But now it’s politically funded. That’s a contradiction in terms to me. I don’t ignore it. I have gone to see the Turner Prize stuff but if I went to Paris I’d go to see Monet.

There are lots of Irish artists that I like: Sean McSweeney, Cliona Cussen, Carolyn Mulholland, Basil Blackshaw, Simon McWilliams… With the sculptors, by and large, they are working in stone or bronze, so there’s an integrity to the materials and their demands, and so where people have respect for the validity of paint and its demands, then I have respect. The greatest living British artist is Freud, whether you like his work or not. Total painting!
The whole concept of figurative art has been with us for 40,000 years and I can’t see how conceptual art fulfils my criteria, other than as self-indulgence on the part of viewer and creator. But it’s not a big issue with me.

I used to like Appel, De Stael… I don’t know any of the modern Germans. I like some reproductions of the Italian Neo-Expressionists but many I didn’t like…disturbing images for the sake of being disturbing. Really and truly, most of the time I’m just interested in what I’m doing myself. I go to art galleries everywhere but just to enjoy myself. Art is what an individual does. I do see myself as being in the tradition of art as I see it! Using paint to create images I like that, hopefully, other people will relate to.

BMcA: If there’s a painter that I think of in relation to you, and not just because of the sporting subject matter, it’s Yeats, particularly late Yeats, in terms of his use of colour and the almost viscous and visceral nature of the paint. Would you agree?
J B Vallely: Oh yeah! I loved him. In Dublin the first place I go to is the National Gallery to look at the Yeats. In painterly terms I don’t think as he did, about paint. I see things in a more concrete, delineated way. I like the feeling of his paintings, and the man and his attitude to life. It probably sounds terribly presumptuous…but I wouldn’t just be satisfied with, say, the way Yeats would have finished paintings. Yeats’ whole concept is the ambience of the scene whereas I would end up leaving all that out, and just painting the figures.

BMcA: You returned to Armagh in 1966 and have, more or less, stayed there ever since. Why?
J B Vallely: Somebody stops out on the road, and asks a farmer for a direction. ‘Well, if I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here!’ Possibly, if I hadn’t been born here, I wouldn’t have picked it. I was exhibiting in Dublin, had a studio in Edinburgh (shared with Fred Carson, the ceramicist) –and there was a good framer there, Robert Barr, who has since died. Really and truly I can’t say what brought me back to Armagh! I never got out of it again, though once back however, I quickly discovered my roots again.

I got involved in the community, in athletics and started an athletics club in 1967, was involved in music and started the music club (The Armagh Pipers), and so bit by bit I became involved with Armagh, got married, and both myself and my wife decided that we’d settle here. It was a gradual process: running and coaching in the athletics club; teaching in the music club; and briefly being involved in agitational politics. I did then begin to identify with family history losing all contact with Belfast, Dublin and Edinburgh – though I did travel every year but I had no money, so we camped for twenty-five years. Real camping: with a tent.

Up to the early 1970s I was a naive person who had a painless transition into the world of art. Naive and complacent. Then I got a severe setback with an onslaught from the Dublin critics, which I took very personally. No matter how arrogant or self confident you are, everyone can be got at. It had a more profound impact on me than I would like to admit. I lost all my naivety and trust in anything except myself. I had done them no harm but they had tried to seriously harm and compromise my job.

One critic wrote a savage denunciation of the 1973 Hendriks’ show (one of the paintings in the same show recently made £35,000 at Sotheby’s (Fig 11) which gave me some satisfaction…). Another wrote a number of scathing reviews and went to the houses of a number of collectors who had bought my work and told them that they had made a serious error of judgement. After that I only really exhibited at Caldwell’s.

In the art scene in the 1960s there were few galleries and few artists. Now there’s a healthy number and it’s a good thing. It’s not as elitist an occupation as it used to be. I’m constantly humbled by people who make sacrifices to buy paintings…but I’m quite optimistic…

The John B Vallely exhibition will run at the Davis Gallery in Dublin 7-20 December
Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.