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IMichael Cullen’s studio is on the first floor of a Georgian tenement
building. It’s a high ceiling room, with a fine ‘rose’
in the centre of the ceiling, a large north-facing window and five easels,
one of which has a large painting-in-progress on the theme of Velázquez’s
Las Meninas. To the left of this, another large painting, this time on
brown paper, is on a similar theme. On the one wall which is uncluttered,
and taking up almost the whole length and height of it, a canvas has been
affixed, and another work is in progress, albeit at a much more sketchy
stage. At the corner of the wall is a steel ladder and several long rolls
of carpet, plus bits of long stretchers. The floor rather a long time
ago was painted a creamy white and now, in marked contrast to the surrounding
paintings, takes on a rather genteel patination of restrained pigment.
This huge, square box of a room, which also contains a small self-built
mezzanine with a bed, and storage space for canvases, should, in theory,
seem cluttered. There are bookcases, and loads of books, a bench stacked
with the usual paraphernalia, but on rollers, lightweight masks on the
walls, as well as lots of large paintings, photographs, invitation cards,
and an Icelandic forest of baked bean cans and jars, bristling with large
brushes, most of which are arranged in front of the biggest canvas. (Remember
the old joke: If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, how do you find
your way out? Answer: stand up!). Rather like his paintings, a huge range
of imagery is reduced to an orderly, tidy sequence (Fig 1).
Michael Cullen is one of a group of Irish painters (I’m thinking
of Paddy Graham, Pat Hall, Gerry Gleason, David Crone, Brian Maguire and
Gwen O’Dowd amongst many others), all of whom, from very early on
in their careers, were intensely ambitious and regularly worked, often
very successfully, on a large scale. Scale is dangerous, but seductive,
especially for young artists. They want to make a splash, to feel self-important,
to elbow the competition off the gallery walls. For every American Colour-Field
painter, or Brit Pop artist, who successfully married a large-scale canvas
with a painterly idea, which was consonant with the scale, there were
thousands who inflated small-scale ideas into grandiose pretentiousness.
Scale wasn’t the only challenge. The entire world of art history
was another. Any artist is part of the cyclic process of visual mastication,
feeding off what has come before and, if they are of any interest, presenting
painterly flesh to their successors. Most artists ‘work through’
various influences, absorbing them, re-ordering them, making them their
own. Frequently they attempt to disguise the indebtedness. Every now and
then a painter obsessively squares up to a major figure from art history—like
Picasso’s variations on Velázquez’s Las Meninas, or Francis
Bacon’s reworking of the same artist’s Pope Innocent X. One
could regard this as hubris, as vanity or ambition; or perhaps as sheer
stupidity. There can be the sense of wanting to measure oneself against
an acknowledged master; of wanting to absorb the formal and technical
virtuosity, the psychological insight and the expressive potential into
one’s own bloodstream.
It’s an extremely dangerous course as the artist lays himself or
herself bare to the charge that, by comparison, they are unworthy. It
can have other unwanted side effects. John Berger, for example, thought
Picasso’s variations on Velázquez demonstrated the decline
of Picasso’s creativity: an old man reduced to playing with other
people’s ideas. So when an Irish artist doubles up on the dangerous,
working big, and working out of major artists like Velázquez and
Van Gogh, one sits up and takes notice!
Cullen himself, an elongated exclamation mark of a man, always initially
seems reserved, quiet, and a model citizen. This, of course, is a conjuring
trick, as no respectable painter is ever a model citizen. I once stayed
with him for a week in the Languedoc, in a blaze of booze, sunshine and
stunning food—the man is a great cook—so naturally he had sandwiches
for me when I arrived at lunchtime, as he also has the Northern Irish
Presbyterian sense, that work is work. Putting aside memories of mountains
of shellfish, fine white wines, and the sun slowly sinking over a bay
as blue as that of Cannes, I munched on my sandwiches and got down to…
work.
BMcA: The genesis of an image, for any painter, can be a complicated,
source-informed hunt for the apt, often cross-fertilised by chance elements,
whether within the actual brushstrokes themselves, or deliberately incurred
outside of them—I’m thinking of a painter like Francis Bacon
whose images seem to have come from a dialogue with multiple, photographically-based
source material, overlaid with a deliberate courting of chance elements.
On the other hand, some painters seem to have an instinctively swift facility
in the production of images, without the need for agonising. How do you
generate your images?
M C: I wish I knew! Often it’s maybe a chicken-and-egg situation…osmosis…a
kickstart…something comes into your head or through the door. You
pick up on something. It could be subliminal—and then you start.
It’s an overlayering of desire and inclination. What generates an
image? Okay, I’ll tell you. I was going to do a painting, in Annaghmakerrig,
which I intended as a gift, as I’d been there for a long time at
nominal expense. I had a large canvas. This canvas was to go into the
music room, the biggest room in the house, where painters weren’t
normally allowed in. I put the blank canvas up on the wall but I hadn’t
a clue as to what I was going to do. Then I noticed a sizable pier-glass
on the wall behind me. That brought me back a quarter of a century to
the Prado, and the first time I’d seen Las Meninas which was, then,
in a room on its own, with a large mirror on the opposite wall. And so
I had the idea. I painted a crude version of Las Meninas. The spark was
in turning around and seeing the mirror, then memory; and so I used the
actual measurements of the Velázquez picture (about half of my
painting space) incorporated into my whole, and concluded the painting
by taking the Velázquez and putting him into my studio. It’s
a mirrored space. Painting is always a question of space and of time also
(Fig 2).|
Another time, it was a subliminal image from TV, a split second. I painted
what I thought I saw, and did a series of monkey paintings—I got
two years of work out of that (Fig 3). [I point to the large art book
opened at Las Meninas, which is in front of an easel]. Reproductions are
the floating gallery. They always have been, and particularly since printing
became established: think of the use of mezzotints, when prints were used
to disseminate artists’ images. If I didn’t see them, I couldn’t
use them!
BMcA: Did your early experience of lithography influence the way in
which you work?
M C: Probably. I’m involved in printing, at intervals. I do the
plates, then a master printer does the rest. You’re very aware that
your image is going to be reversed. Over the years my mind often reverses
things. You can look in a mirror and do it but I don’t. It’s
like going through Alice’s looking glass, having access to the world
in reverse. Optically, we see upside down, but it’s rearranged in
the brain. Painting is a product of optics: you paint what you can see,
even if it’s in the mind’s eye and you’ve never actually
seen it in reality—you relate it to the visual experience of seeing.
Always you want to surprise yourself, anything that will facilitate the
emotional charge, the fire in the belly.
BMcA: On one of the four easels is a large work-in-progress. It’s
made up of ten component images, including two Las Meninas-style girls,
a dog, a three-quarters open door, another opened door which might be
a mirror and so forth, the whole a perceptual manipulation in that the
individual images seem, initially, to be laid flatly, like cards on the
canvas, in a two-dimensional space paralleling the picture-plane, but
actually the space shifts, twists and turns as if honeycombed with spatial
‘wormholes.’
M C: I started at the top right (indicating a section like a piece
of sawn off flat wooden fencing). My original intention was to cut out
each image, but then I got to the point where I asked myself: do I keep
it as is, or fragment it? At which point I saw the possibilities of play…
.
A painting is a form of expression, a language. One thing begets another.
Once you have commenced, once the paint goes on the canvas, you are creating
avenues, opening them up. The paint can end up anywhere, but there’s
a desire to take the painting somewhere. You get it up and started; fatten
it up. All kinds of possibilities emerge. Your only limitation is your
imagination.
 For
me there’s the middle of a painting, and the edges—these are
important. With your edge you can state, you can alter the shape of the
canvas by altering the edge. You can play with the edges. If you are reading
a book, you pick up on something. Maybe a phrase that you’ve come
across earlier on re-emerges and that rings a bell. It’s an internal
tension. Line, form, and colour are the three great staples. A painting
is a battle to imbue them on the canvas; to give expression to them (Figs
4 & 6).
BMcA:You regularly make large-scale paintings. Filling a space is easy.
Making a big space ‘work’, isn’t. What tactics do you deploy?
M C: Physicality more than anything...the feeling that you can create
a space on the wall that you can nearly jump into. Also ambition. Van
Gogh never painted anything bigger than a metre or so. You only have to
look around you (gestures around the studio). It’s sixteen-feet high
and twenty-two broad, so I have a great wall.
The first time I did a big painting was in the sixties, in the mountains.
At two by three feet, I thought it was big! Then in Spain I did one about
five and a half foot by three and a half. But when I was at the NCA I
began experimenting with scale. When I first came into this room, I started
working larger automatically. Then in Berlin, I had a 500-square metre
studio for a whole summer—the biggest I’ve ever had in my life—-my
regular Berlin studio was only 100 square metres. The ambition is to make
something big: one normally goes from small to big, working your way up,
but I do the opposite. I seem to have a need to do this. Often a large
work is a study for smaller works.
BMcA: Humour is a very rare element in painting, and you have it in
spades. It’s not just the ‘cartooned’ elements, but also
the visual jokes and little painterly tropes. I know many painters who
are very humorous, in themselves, yet do not integrate this element into
their work. But you do. Is it a conscious decision?
 M
C: You know what laughter is? An expression of fear. Fear is the strongest
most over-riding emotion. A lot of the time we are racked with fear and
laughter is the only release. I find that I can’t paraphrase all
my experiences verbally. I’m always full of admiration for a good
writer who can express profundities with panache and facility. For me
to try and explain about humour…well…it comes when you inadvertently
say something that turns out to be funny. It comes out of the blue (Fig
5). Often it’s to alleviate the sense of dread that is so pervasive
in life. I never intended humour to have any part in what I do or say.
It’s off-the-cuff. I’ve no intention of being funny in painting—yet
it appears that way! To be serious is one thing. To be funny is another.
To be able to play both, however, that’s a serious act. Children
rehearse their later adult roles in play. You have to enjoy what you do
.
BMcA: The novelist E M Forster said of the novelist Dickens that he
bounced his caricatural figures into a semblance of real life. Now you,
consistently and increasingly, marry flat pattern, primary unmixed colour,
and outline figuration, with an almost sculptural sense of mass, literally
so in terms of the terrain of your impasto. Like Forster’s view of
Dickens, it’s a bouncing from the two to the three-dimensional. How
did you arrive at this stylistic conceit, and how far is it indebted to
Philip Guston?
M C: I came across Guston in San Francisco. He was dead a month or
so and I didn’t know who he was. I came across this native American,
who was quite big, (a little intimidating, but really kind) who directed
me to the National Gallery where there was an entire Guston retrospective.
I was very taken with the later works. The early ones are very derivative;
we all have to go through our apprenticeship. Initially, in his abstract
expressionist period, I couldn’t distinguish a Guston from a De Kooning.
I felt an affinity with his last period, then, though not now. For me
they seem to have palled a little.
Very early on I used a palette knife—thirty-five years ago in fact.
Like most young painters I liked the abundance of pigment. Then it was
probably a shortcut to solving technical problems. Now it’s nice
to have passages here and there. I remember Keinholtz saying that he went
into sculpture as a result of painting with a yard brush: the deposit
of paint became so heavy that it became sculpture. He was trying to distance
himself from the Abstract Expressionists. He became a sculptor yet retained
his integrity as a painter—a painter who used sculpture as a support
for painting.
BMcA: You often use a restricted palette. Why?
M C: You have the basic colours. There’s a limit to the permutations,
though I haven’t found it. My palette began to develop in Spain.
Everything’s tonal in the grey light of the north. In Spain however,
in strong light, everything appeared white, with the shadows abounding
in pure colour. What seemed to strike a chord was the intensity of the
colour in the shadows. You could put pure colour into them, reds, yellows,
and blues, so this brought me across, or over to the other side, so to
speak. It’s more attractive to me to use pure colour. Every time
I look at the history of art, I note that it’s the mark of the 20th
century that pure colour becomes a part of the stuff of painting. I like
colour.
BMcA: I’d like you to comment on sound in relation to painting.
In a catalogue to a drawing exhibition, you once reflected that ‘in
the depiction of a world sans sound, the spectator does in fact hear the
silent sound of painting’, such as a scream or a storm at sea. You
also noted that Velázquez’ Las Meninas was a play on mirrored
space which took on an entirely new dimension if you played a piece of
music by Domenico Scarlatti in front of it. Now you enjoy music, and theatre.
Picasso enjoyed Las Meninas enough to do a whole series of variations
on it. So two questions really. Does music and musical structure play
a part in how you structure your painting? And does your ‘figure-in-the-carpet’
approach to much of your recent work betoken a Picasso-like interest in
demolishing ‘theatrical’ space in favour of musical space?
M C: My hearing isn’t very good: it’s been a lifetime thing.
In my school years, from five onwards, I had a hearing problem. For years
not knowing any better I didn’t realise to what extent it affected
my education. So much effort was needed to hear that eventually I would
internalise into another space. It happens when I’m listening to
the radio. People say: why don’t you get a hearing aid? But I’m
quite content with my condition. I depend more on my visual sense than
my ears. Maybe that’s why I became a painter.
I come out of the cinema and people ask me what did I think of the score,
but I haven’t heard it because I’ve been so totally engrossed
in the visual elements. I do, greatly, enjoy listening to music and going
to concerts. I remember going to hear Yehudi Menuhin celebrate his eightieth
birthday by conducting Beethoven’s Ninth in Montpelier. While listening,
I was more intent on the visuals, though the music and singing was out
of this world and I was transported, but I still couldn’t ignore
the visuals. Next day I did a watercolour which included some 300 to 400
persons, musicians, choir and audience, plus a dog in foreground, with
the great man at the centre of the composition. I love watching the musicians
with their instruments, and it helps me to source the sounds.
I know the music is carrying me places. I can’t distinguish the nuances
but I identify classical music and jazz with high art…a bit snobbish
maybe…Sometimes I feel when I’m painting a sense of transformation:
the painting is like an expression of music. I often think there is a
musical instinct which I carry within myself and which is transmogrified,
visually, in the painting: the gradation of colour—not tone, which
is muted—the play of contrasts and harmonies…synaesthesia
BMcA: The Cullen universe seems to be a commedia dell’arte world,
inhabited by commedia dell’arte stock types (clowns, models, the
prole, the artist, assorted menagerie, and so forth) as well as by witty
permutations on stock plots. Do you recognise this description of your
world?
M C: I’ve always liked the commedia dell’arte, though I
imagine that you as a playwright would know more about it than I do. I’m
not terribly familiar with its history but I like the visual elements
of it. There’s a nice scene in the film Death in Venice where the
clowns rush into the hotel, do a number, and are chased out again…it’s
appeared in one of my paintings…
Probably it goes back to the humour thing as well. It’s cliché
material: shortcuts to expression. The commedia concentrates on the vanity
of life, of its aspirations, and magical aspects. I’ve never investigated
it too strongly though. The comic figures of Pierre Longhi and Watteau
come to mind, and Cézanne’s Harlequin. Picasso, I understand,
in his early life identified with the Harlequin. Both he and Apollinaire
between themselves made a lot of play with aspects of the commedia.
BMcA: Your career exhibits what I might call a certain geographical
insecurity or restlessness. You’ve spent long periods abroad, most
recently in the Languedoc area of France, as well as acclimatising yourself
for substantial sojourns in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Morocco
and Berlin. What continuously prompts this urge, not just to travel, but
to stay away from Ireland; and has there been a change, over the years,
in terms of what you get out of such foragings?
M C: I never thought of myself as having a career! When I started
out, that didn’t enter into things. A career is what you make it.
If your work is your hobby, then you stand to be in good stead in relation
to it! I suppose what prompted me, in my teens, to get out, was that I
was curious about what lay beyond Dun Laoghaire pier! My first outing
across the Irish Sea.
My earliest motivation was economical. Income was so low that if you got
some money, you went somewhere where you could stretch it, and apply yourself
to your painting. Roundabout 1969 I was going to go to Italy but I met
some people in Paris and ended up in Spain. I’d just had an exhibition,
at a gallery in the Dublin mountains where I’d been artist-in-residence—you
looked after the gallery and in return you got a retainer, studio, and
materials, plus a third of the sales of your own paintings. I’d had
the idea of going to the South and so I hitchhiked, ending up in Malaga
(I was barely aware of where it was) with all the paraphernalia of the
painter on my back. I was there for a year, and then did the grand Western
European tour, having gotten rid of excess baggage, apart from a roll
of paintings, and my brushes.
Having discovered the way off the island, [Ireland], I was curious about
other places. Morocco was the next one. This time I took a plane! At the
time when I was in Spain I had to learn the language or some semblance
of it, just for everyday requirements, but the emotion required for doing
just that infringed on, or siphoned off or dissipated, a lot of the emotions
necessary for painting. I actually did fifty or sixty paintings there,
as well as over 300 drawings, but I wasn’t satisfied with the end
result. In Morocco I didn’t engage with Arabic or Berber. Instead
I relied on pidgin French to get about. I was much happier with my painting.
At this point I began to find myself. It’s only in hindsight that
you appreciate what was beneficial. I knew there would be some residue.
Before Spain all of my paintings were grey and tonal. I self-trained as
an academic painter, in spite of having strong leanings towards modernism,
before ending up full time at the NCA.
In Spain, and on the European tour, I looked at a lot of post-war artists:
Dubuffet, De Stael, the Art Brut scene; and I saw a lot of major exhibitions:
retrospectives of Rothko, De Kooning, Pollock and Barnet Newman for instance.
In Cologne I saw one of the first Art Fairs there in which there wasn’t
an academic painting in sight. As for Northern Italy, it was like a big
art book with the whole history unfolded, but in its physicality. Travelling
takes you out of the backwater and into the mainstream. You are no longer
just local, but thrust into the over-riding concepts of the present day.
One is trying to get to the cutting-edge of a contemporaneous understanding
of things. You want to put your time into something that brings you closer
to your own self, and not just to received notions of art.
Thirty or forty years back I thought we were on the cusp of great change—that
we had come to a great plateau. Forty years later it seems as if we had
just moved out of the Stone Age. So project yourself another forty years
hence and imagine how things may appear then. I always want to paint.
I always do paint, take notes, or do watercolours, though they are just
that…notes. If I go on a holiday it’s a busman’s holiday.
For me, painting is a continuous activity. You maintain a rhythm and a
momentum, so as to be in a state of fluency when you paint.
BMcA: Berlin, in the early eighties, seems to have been a catalyst
for you in all sorts of ways. It’s the one period where, in much
of the work, the colour is muted, the flamboyance absent, the world view
dark and pessimistic. It seems to me that this period gave an underlying
strength to your work: a dark substratum which allowed you anchorage in
the dark psychic world of the self, but also allowed you, like an elastic
band stretched and released, to explore the exuberant and optimistic without
losing touch with the darker self. Would you agree?
M C: Every day we’re faced with the dark elements—the most
prevalent elements of the human condition. We live in the face of it and
its inclemencies. What people do is to try and deal with the dark side,
to cope with it. We’ve survived to the present day— so far.
Berlin was the theatre of this, in the thirties and forties, in my imagination.
When I was young, people talked in hushed terms about the Atomic Bomb.
There was rationing at the time. Coming to a city like Berlin awakened
something in me. It had quite an effect on the imagination. I ended up
being there for years. I suppose it’s to do with personal insecurities.
Northern Ireland was a war zone, there was in Berlin, just as there had
been here, partition…perhaps it was a kind of paraphrase for all
of that; an illustration or a kind of symbol of man’s inhumanity
to man. Painting the darkness is an intriguing thing: it’s like having
a candle to lead you out of the darkness.
BMcA: You were born in 1946. For someone growing up in the Ireland
of the 1950s and 1960s, who or what were the important Irish influences
in terms of things like TV, movies, the landscape, Irish artists and writers,
and so forth?
M C: My experience of the fifties was of a certain richness. People
are quick to dismiss that period now, but today’s Ireland was being
constructed in the fifties. In terms of influences, well, I probably came
on Joyce around 1962. I remember seeing an interview on the new RTÉ
with Richard Ellmann, his life of Joyce having been just published. I
was seven or eight when I came across Yeats, though I can’t recall
when I first became conscious of Joyce. At sixteen I started struggling
with Ulysses. Joyce, Beckett, Behan, O’Casey and Yeats (not to mention
writers from other countries) became a part of the canon of writers that
formed my reading. They were the literary icons of my mind-scape. I read
them to find out what other people were talking about, and so became tainted.
You couldn’t escape them: they were embedded in the intellectual
psyche of the time. It’s fascinating to take a book like Ulysses
and realise, each time you take it up, that it’s entirely modern
and fresh whilst to my reading, anticipating post-modernism. Its richness
is also becoming increasingly transparent as I re-read.
Someone like Patrick Collins typifies the period we’re talking about.
When I came across him in the early sixties, in Living Art, there were
also all those Northern Irish painters like Campbell, Dillon, Arthur Armstrong,
as well as le Brocquy whom everybody (that is, the oarsmen in the galley)
loved to hate. At the time I responded most to the 65 group—Michael
Kane, Charles Cullen, and John Behan, who were contemporaneous (though
a slightly older generation) with me. I painted landscape—the Wicklow
hills. I didn’t have access to a TV then. No real recollection of
radio either. I could have been in another century. I only came across
TV in other people’s houses. It was books that influenced me really,
and the occasional exhibition at the National or the Municipal.
BMcA: When I first interviewed you, back in 1987, you remarked on what
then was the NCA period—you were there full time between 1970 and
1973, and at night classes between 1962 and 1969—(There was a three-year
period in between, 1963-65, when you ‘pursued a dissolute existence’).
The energy and talent produced during this period seemed to be due to
the students dismantling the state apparatus of education. Tell us about
the period.
M C: During that earlier interview you referred to, I told you that
I got most of my education from my peers. It was an experimental period,
the student body had created a free space, and was maintained for all
of the time that I was there, though there were only about a hundred students
on the register. Of those, maybe about twenty percent followed the pastoral
courses. It was probably no accident that we got such a successful concentration
of artists: Brian Maguire, Charlie Tyrell, Martin Gale, Cathy Carman,
Gene Lambert et al. Charles Cullen was one of the few teachers there who
commanded respect along with Alice Hanratty, Paul Funge, and the late
Ruth Brandt. They didn’t see themselves as teachers per se, rather
more as practising artists who had something to teach. And they are, to
the present day, outstanding artists. I suppose, overall, as students,
we became less politically naïve.
BMcA: Unlike many of your contemporaries, for example Brian Maguire,
Patrick Graham, and Michael Kane, you’ve never evinced much of an
interest in notions of nationality, Irish identity, or political alignment.
Why?
M C: It wasn’t in my background to begin with. My father always
said ‘Keep away from religion and politics. It’ll only end up
in a row’. I didn’t grow up in a political atmosphere. I’m
also half of two persuasions, religiously speaking, and as a result am
totally inoculated against organised religion, or religion full stop!
I’m Irish. I wouldn’t want to be anything else. One can never
get away from it and if you don’t think you are Irish people will
soon tell you anyway that you are: it’s the accent…I like to
think that I’m a person in the world, always carrying a sense of
place with me. Nationality is a kind of ethnic thing. It puts a cast on
how you see the world. National distinctions don’t interest me that
much. I’m quite comfortable with my identity. I’m basically
a solipsist, an egoist in a positive sense, I believe. A painter needs
this in order to be able to function as a single entity working alone
within the four walls of a studio space. That’s the most important
thing. Regarding Ireland I’ll always come back here.
Today I think painting is all about time: you freeze time. Velázquez
is a prime example. Good painters aspire to the poetical—a poet is
a maker. What’s the purpose of any medium if it can’t facilitate
an individual’s needs? Painting is a mechanical operation. The painter
must transend this limitation... good painters achieves this.
Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.
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