In the 1980s when I first went to interview Brian Maguire, his studio was in a tumbledown squat in Mountjoy Square. It was dilapidated, cold, and on the top floor, with bare neon lighting. Canvases, huge ones, were stacked roughly; polystyrene panels were used as palettes; brushes were soaking in buckets of water as he painted in acrylic; and tubes as well as buckets of paint littered the place.
Times have changed. His studio (when he is in Ireland) is in the garden of his house in Sandyford. There is a large shower room in it (used in the making of paintings), which is filled with buckets of brushes, along with a couch bed, and neat steel shelves for his paints. Mind you, I wouldn’t put it past him to have cleaned up, just to put me off the scent…
He may have put on a little bit of weight but he still drives like a street urchin on speed. The hair is thinning, and so is the hammer-like consistency of four letter words, which are now down to a trickle, but he is still, recognizably, the same streetwise politician, his hardman image now being encased in an overcoat of charm. From fomenting art student revolution he has, Daniel Cohn-Bendit style, risen to the giddy heights of NCAD. From the early days of expressionist angst he has become one of those artists who can work locally and internationally, exhibiting regularly in Europe and the USA.

Brian McAvera: Brian, there’s a certain degree of confusion as to where you were born and I remember you talking to me, long ago, about your Fermanagh father and how close you felt to that territory. So just what are your antecedents, and how do you define your identity: Northern Irish, Southern Irish, European, pot pourri…?
BM: I grew up in Bray. The thing is that most people who visited our house in Florence Road were from a particular townland in Fermanagh, Aughindiagh, where my father had grown up. For me the ‘local’ people all had Northern accents. Then the civil rights marches in the late 1960s brought the North into focus. The terrace of red brick houses in which we lived was positioned at equal distance from the two institutions of our upbringing: the library and the Catholic church. Across the road a small Protestant church witnessed the ‘other’.

BMcA:What are the dominant memories of your childhood, say, up to about ten years of age, what, in terms of colour, are the hues burnished into your memory?
BM: Like anybody else, a lot of my memories are very private. My early childhood was spent running over Bray Head, the dump, and the cliffs by the sea. I think of water moving over rocks, of sensual blacks…the shadows in trees which are blocking the light….gorse…then bedrooms with the light turned out; and the cinema. In wintertime, somehow I saw every film that came to both cinemas in town. This extended the world of the imagination. As a child, I learnt how to spend time alone. You became an actor in every film you saw, every book you read. The safest place to be was the the place of the imagination.

BMcA: Bray is a seaside town, and yet you have always been an aggressively urban painter. Can you explain the paradox?
BM: The paintings, as a whole, don’t come from a sense of place. Usually it’s from a sense of anger. The wish is to empathise – often overlaid with the reality of injustice - to leave a silent marker. It’s the experience of pain that comes back and visits us uninvited, whereas we have to work really hard to recall our pleasure.
I’ve always wanted to make a painting of an idyllic childhood memory, but it has never been realised. There was one memory of lovers carpeting Bray Head all the way up to the cross at the top. But I never could figure out how to do it…but a beating or a hanging…they seem to be easier for me.

BMcA: In the early and mid-1980s you were, so to speak, doing a brisk crawl through the choppy waters of what passed for Southern Irish ‘Neo-Expressionism’. I’m thinking of Homage to 1984 for example, always seemed to me to be rooted in a very personal and deep-seated angst. Can you tell us how your version of Neo-Expressionism developed, and how far you still regard sex and violence as the lens or prism through which you view human nature?
BM: Painting was and is the primary language. It came from studying the German, Kathe Kollowitz, the Norwegian, Munch, and others of the Weimar period including Beckmann, they all had something for me.
They all dealt with human emotion and my identification with this led to the experience of belief in the other (in this case the artist) and consequently the experience of being alone is diminished. What interests me now in retrospect is that in my youth there was no language with which to discuss emotion. Incidentally, I believe that this very denial of an emotional language to young people shielded the abusers. I used my own experience as a primary source. Truth was an existential reality. Politics arrived with the civil rights marches in the North and the housing action committees in Dublin and Wicklow. Marxism became an ethical standard.
Violence, well, I came of age in a violent time in the seventies with beatings from the police, paramilitaries, killings, the soldiers...it was a chaotic time in which to be eighteen or nineteen. This time is probably why I spent years reading the literature of violence. I believe it is a modern duty to visit Auschwitz.

BMcA:When you were in your teens, did you think of yourself as an artist? How did you start?
BM: No. I began slowly to consider myself as an artist when I started exhibiting in the Lincoln Gallery with Blathin De Sache in the early 1980s.

BMcA:You studied at Dun Laoghaire Technical School, and then at the National College of Art. How formative were these periods? Did any particular lecturers interest you, and what artists, Irish or otherwise, attracted you at the time?
BM: Dun Laoghaire was extremely formative for me. There Eoin Butler and the recently deceased Trevor Scott taught a course based on that of the Bauhaus. It created an understanding of two-dimensional space. However it only dealt with the how, not with the why. All of us who wanted to went on to places in college. From Trevor Scott I received an introduction to student politics.
I went to the NCA, based in the stables of Leinster House, Kildare Street, which was run directly by the Department of Education. Officer posts in the RHA also held senior posts within the College. It was the younger staff and students who eventually made it change. The old academic plaster-cast-based teaching finally disappeared. There was an act passed in the seventies, and it’s the same act that governs the college today. (There was no library for example).
NCAD now has a library on a par with other Irish universities and is the site of the National Irish Arts Archive. As a college it resisted change in the 1970s. There were street disturbances, occupations and the usual response of sackings and suspensions looking for someone to blame amongst the student body. As young students we were summoned to tribunals. On one occasion the authorities said I couldn’t possibly be a leader, as one of the youngest, so they said that if I would give them the names of the leaders I could come back. I gave them their own names….

BMcA: Brian Fallon once remarked of you that you were ‘a product of the seventies, a decade of unemployment, ideological disillusionment and social malaise,’ and that that accounted for the mood of many of your works. Do you agree?
BM: I am the product of a fortunate household where my father went to work every day and we never wanted, as a family. I was unemployed during the 1970s. In particular, when I went into prisons in the mid-1980s, it was obvious that unemployment played a role, as a lot of people who go to jail are unemployed. Young people emigrated. It was my intention to reflect the society I lived in.

BMcA: Donald Kuspit, with whom you have had a long association, clearly labels you as a Neo-Expressionist as various critics have pointed out. Are you happy with this label?
BM: I don’t bother myself too much with this labelling. My responsibility extends to doing my own work. I am interested in political history, theory, and action as well as art criticism. Neo- Expressionism and Irish Expressionism may all sound like solid insults, but none of this stuff has any impact when put beside Kathe Kollowitz, or the Fuck paintings of Salome from the early eighties. Sal’s work creates the space for homosexuality on the museum walls. There were Neo-Expressionist works that I respect. Maybe my own work is an aberration, but it’s not a question I will answer. Just like everyone in the world I do the best I can at any given time. Later others may judge its value. Donald Kuspit has written on my work over a period of fifteen years.

BMcA:I remember your studio in Mountjoy Square as being chaotic, not to mention being dangerous. How has your day changed since that period in the eighties?
BM: Mostly I don’t play snooker during the day any more. After Mountjoy Square I began what over time became a system of travelling each year, renting studios in North and South America and Northern and Central Europe. I now have a studio where I live and a certain amount of work gets done there.
Another reason for going away was to make a livelihood. I sold work abroad. For around ten years, starting in the mid-1980s, Ed and Nancy Keinholtz bought my more difficult work. They also introduced my work to, amongst others, Monte and Betty Factor in Los Angeles, and Marilyn Oshman in Texas.

BMcA: You’ve always been a political animal, working in both party and art politics. In what ways has this informed your art practice, and to what extent do you think it has shaped the way in which you have developed your career?
BM: I’ve always seen society as being organised along class lines. I have held some form of of membership of what became the Worker’s Party and subsequently the Labour Party since 1969. If anything, it has provided me with a link to society that was not artistic. This shaped the development of my work more than anything else. The projects I did usually stemmed from people who held a similar view of society. The first show that I did with the Douglas Hyde Gallery and the Orchard Gallery was, according to one comment ‘a pictorial history of the Worker’s Party’. My political views came through, but my views have changed over the years. I’ve tried to reflect working class life as I’ve met it in Sao Paulo, the USA or East Belfast.

BMcA: Paula Murphy, referring to Mother with Head of a Dead Hunger Striker considered that you ‘align yourself with the Republican Movement’. Is this a description that you do or don’t accept, and why?
BM: By the time Long Kesh was shut down I had worked in a collaborative way with IRA men, INLA men, LVF men, and UVF and UDA connected groups. At the time I did the picture referred to, around 1981 or 1982, it was about the tragedy of the men’s sacrifice and the positive evil of the British State who attempted, in Pontius Pilate fashion, to wash their hands of the whole process at the eleventh hour, handing the decision of life or death over to the mothers of the Hunger Strikers. I reflected what I saw whether or not it suited my politics. Kuspit speaking in Boston in 1985 asserted that this work was an image of tragedy with which any people could identify and as such he thought that the title (locating the work in Ireland) limited people’s ability to respond to the work.
This was a time when Republicans and others were treated like pariahs everywhere in the print media. I got a degree of abuse for painting Michael Stone, however a couple of years later, he is a guest on the Late Late Show, in RTE that barometer of popular culture. Times change.

BMcA: Are you not giving credibility to the likes of a Michael Stone?
BM: I don’t condone what he did or indeed what anyone did. However if you are going to be judgemental then you have no place going inside the walls of the prison. Secondly if, as a society, we decide not to execute men and women, it means that the potential of change that is within all sane human beings is within people who are in prison. On the outside you read of the crime, the victim, the trial and the conviction and on the inside we meet the man. The crime belongs to the life before imprisonment (Fig 7). It is seldom raised except where a man asserts his innocence. It does not follow that in respecting the humanity of a prisoner one is disrespecting the victim of the crime. A separation of the person from their past behaviour is necessary. Of course if what you want is for the prisoner to continually suffer and the deprivation of liberty is not enough for you then you will be angry at any respect shown to the prisoner. As an artist I wanted to help celebrate their home-coming. The war was over. But as the project unfolded it seemed to me that the Good Friday Agreement for government was in part a tactic for control which of necessity involved releasing people.
This project involved going into prison, painting men from each group of prisoners, who would then arrange introductions for me in their community. I had originally developed the project for Berlin. I applied it in West and East Belfast. At that time we were breaking new ground by engaging with each other. I saw these men on RTE news recently in East Belfast, shaking hands with Mary McAleese…

BMcA: Architecture as a metaphor, by which I mean the use of elements of architectural presence as a loose scaffolding, to create a sense of enclosure, is often present in your work. Do you agree?
BM: You are right! Mostly I’ve painted people on their own but I’ve often used a scaffolding to isolate people. When I went into a prison in early 1986, I found a physical architecture which gav e expression to its emotional content – not unlike the architecture I used as metaphor.
When I painted images of jail like the Big House, I didn’t have to invent, it was a metaphor for itself.

BMcA: Can you take us through the successive stages in the creation of a painting?
BM: Some paintings begin with memory. There’s a period of research: reading, acquiring photos, talking to eyewitnesses or survivors. Memory is the key. I tend to work in series, where one work will lead to another. For example with the works in relation to Iraq, they lead to each other. It began with the memory of being around Ruby Ridge, Idaho, when the FBI had the Weaver family under siege, and then a few years later the WACO siege in Texas.
I start a painting and keep going until I can’t go any further. Then I’d keep revisiting for two to three months on a large work and two to three weeks on a small one. I put paint on, then take it off, pushing it beyond where it works in order to identify that point, and then try to scramble back. It’s a continual process of adding and subtracting. When I fail, it’s taken out, put away, and then harnessed to a new idea at a later date.
In Irish Landscape for example the peat is painted first, the colours being put down from Indian Red to Van Dyck Brown, as the turf gets darker. The acrylic was allowed to dry and then hosed, by pouring on water. It depends on the force necessary to remove the paint, and the amount of paint that needs removing, and how hard it is – all kinds of variables. The paint is removed from top to bottom, and then re-applied. Certain aspects [pointing to the long white lines in the painting], the ‘rivers’ for example, are left.
In The Memorial the paint was removed from different sections by pouring water, so painting out gives some shapes, and painting in gives others. Sometimes I lift paint by pressing towels into it and then lifting off. There’s no fetish. It doesn’t always follow that I know what I’m looking for. You have to hunt around for an image.
With the 12 Days of March portraits – I’d noticed that with police camera photos, the subject is so close to the camera, that the flash lights up the middle of the face – so I removed paint from the centre areas in most of the portraits by the process outlined above.

BMcA: The human figure, isolated, caged, disturbed, disorientated, usually male, and often sexually charged, was at the heart of much of your work in the eighties and early nineties. By the late nineties this had changed. Was this a reflection of maturation, of a man coming to terms with his world, or a deliberate decision to explore other territory?
BM: No. I don’t think so. I’ve continued to make sexually charged male figures – though not as often as before, but they are still there. There’s one in the coming show at the Fenton Gallery in Cork. I would see these works as things I’ve continued to do throughout the past twenty-five years. My palette got greyer and greyer as I spent more time in the prison and when I went to the Rockies in the USA during the summer months of 1991 a reaction set in which changed the palette immediately. One Kerlin Gallery show in the mid-1990s was a response to the first ceasefire in which I in a psychological sense dug the Troubles up. The show opened two weeks after the Canary Wharf explosion and so was I believe coldly regarded as being in bad taste.
The Kerlin show a few years later looked at shopping in New York. I was living in Soho and working on a project for White Box, Chelsea, in a number of New York Prisons. The current works to be shown in Cork and in Houston were made in Paris this summer.
But I think the intensity has given way to a more mellow aspect [Produces two works Ruby Ridge and one of Mosul, where Saddam Hussein’s sons were killed] They are attractive looking images I suppose. The drawing is gentle and ironic, the power lying in the irony rather than overtly in the method of painting. I’d like to think that they are still fairly sharp.

BMcA: You almost made a speciality of working in prisons, ranging from Portlaoise, Limerick, Cork and Mountjoy, to Mitchell Prison on Spike Island. What’s the attraction?
BM: Foucault makes the point that, far from prisons being a response to criminal behaviour, structurally they are, in themselves, societies’ criminal action (which only assist and encourage individuals to break the peace). In this way our system uses prisons and prisoners, without ever attempting to address the underlying causes of the crime. This is the tragedy of our prison policy. To help bring self-expression into this process establishes a counterpoint to the process of prison. There’s no queue outside waiting to get in. By the time the artist comes along a whole business of judging and sentencing is over. If the NCAD prison art course could be of some help in providing a context to communicate their position, then it should be there. To educate is to draw out. I have always found a welcome there for these ideas and this has been repeated in Europe and in North and South America.
With prisoners in Irish jails the responsibility rests with us. Whatever conditions are it’s our responsibility, they are our prisoners. Traditionally, among Republican prisoners, there is an immense respect for education. I worked there while I felt useful. Everybody reaches their sell-by date when they have nothing left to offer. I worked in prisons for sixteen years, and then I left. Prison for me is the moral touchstone as to how vengeful we are.

BMcA: Back in 1991 I wrote, in the Parable Island catalogue, about your ‘harsh urban images of marginalized figures (poverty, prostitution, terrorism)’ and how they reflected the invasion of the public domain upon the private person. You stated then that they ‘look clearly at the nightmare quality of our society’. Do you think that that viewpoint is still expressed in your work, and if so, how?
BM: I’ve two shows opening soon, one in a Belgium hospital as part of a public art programme, which is of portraits and patients’ drawings, and the other in the Fenton Gallery composed of imaginative works on paper. In Cork I’m back up on the barricades, looking at the refusal of states who use maximum force to acknowledge the fact that there are children around. In the other exhibition there are fairly gentle pictures of people who are dealing with difficulties in their lives and for whom sitting for me was an act of courage.
To do these works I went to France, to Montreuil outside Paris, it’s a town whose local government is by the French Communist Party, with an industrial background in film, and with a large Mali immigration population. I read Americans like Noam Chomsky, on the nature of the present conflict in Iraq, and on what 9/11 has given birth to.There’s a contradiction in America. Its artists are among the most radical in the world, and its singers are the best [the artist had been playing me country and western singers when we were in his car…] and when you look for twentieth-century heroes you turn to Martin Luther King.

BMcA: Two linked elements, residencies and travelling, seem to be a staple of your life. What do you get out of them?
BM: It’s to create an empty diary, to get quiet time.

BMcA: Becoming Head of Fine Art at NCAD, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one, is an interesting step for one of the ‘bad boys’ of the eighties. Then, anyone less inclined to toe the official line, or produce official art, would have been difficult to imagine. How do you see the career trajectory that you have carved out for yourself?
BM: Not a poisoned chalice, just a detour. It’s a privilege to have a role in the strategic development of a generation of young people’s education. When I was twenty a lot of us tried to mould the future of Irish art education. I remember those principles. While society is class ridden, it is not the fault of our young people. They are not the responsible ones. Education through art is a brilliant preparation for life and work. There should be constant change in the way we educate as in the real world the way artists’ work continually evolves.

BMcA:You’ve done portraits of prisoners, of underprivileged children in São Paulo and of patients in a mental hospital unit. One can see all sorts of ways in which, for the patients with whom you have worked, the experience would be therapeutic and useful. But in most of these cases you have also exhibited the work, and often, major claims have been made for these portraits, as at the Glen Dimplex Award in 1994.
This worries me because, in terms of portraiture, of the art as opposed to the social and political context, the work is quite conventional. It’s the equivalent of the traditional artist’s sketchbook: an annotation of what seizes the artist’s eye. But it seems to me that, just as the sketchbook is a storehouse of ideas, so too these works are probably the preliminaries to other, more substantial arenas. So can you tell us why you do these portraits, how you see their place in your world, and how you view the comments that have been made about them?
BM: The portraits are always produced within a certain context. They are generally not for sale. They are made for the person in the portrait. Working like this began in jail, as a teaching method. The tradition is to learn by watching someone.
The relationship of the artist to the sitter is different from the other watchers in the prison. I felt that there was an element of gentle subversion in making the work in jail.
I try to make work that the person would respect. I felt that it should look like them physically and give some sense of their personality. With Prejudicial Portraits I was trying to make a political /social point about the humanity of men in prisons as opposed to the rules of bureaucracy. That led me later to begin to use the portraits as a means of bringing that which is outside mainstream society into the heart of the cathedrals of mainstream society – the museums. In the São Paulo Bienal the portraits of the children were used to bring the Favela to the Pavilon.
When the Gransha Hospital project portraits were shown in the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery I got a letter from a lady who had wandered in, lonely, separated from her group, who wrote that she had cried at the sense of inclusion she felt at the sight of other mental patients, exhibited with respect, noting that she had spent half her life in American institutions. This letter confirmed the value of the risks taken with the Gransha project.
These are the ways the works have been received. I recognise the conservative nature of the portrait, often it can be the equivalent of the twenty-five year gold watch. I hope that I turn this on its head. I am trying to harness the prejudice within society and play it back to the viewer where relevant.

BMcA: As an ex-chairperson of the Artists Association of Ireland, how do you view its demise?
BM: It’s to be regretted. Its loss is felt most by those artists with the least earning power. Some of its functions are being provided for by organisations like the SSI. In the SSI’s present publication Ken McCue addresses the need for representation. This need was met effectively by the AAI. The need for collective and individual representation is still there. It must not make the same mistake again of taking government money via the Arts Council if it’s to be truly independent. The withdrawal of the Arts Council grant from AAI caused it to conclude its operation. Such power should only rest with its members.

Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.