Brian McAvera: Patrick, you were born in 1943, in Mullingar, sequestered in the midlands at a fairly inauspicious period. What were your family circumstances? Do you think that Mullingar, with its surrounding ‘interior’ vistas, along with the wartime period and your family background, left any trace on your work?

Patrick Graham: It would have. The landscape has influenced my work right up to the present, particularly the low horizon; and that great vista where you can encounter space, and figures in it, in all kinds of ways. It’s a desolate notion of space: rural poverty, with lots of husbands having to leave in war-time. An empty desolation, populated mostly by women. Silences. No conversations. A looking-in, rather than a lived experience. That ‘looking-in on things’ has stayed with me: a self-contained art. The low-level compositional element, the low horizon that is, and the desolation leave you with a longing; an unfinished notion of things. My father left to work in England when I was four, and my mother was left on her own. There was no money, no social system, but it was a self-reliant, poverty helping poverty. Much later I understood it intellectually as socialism, in a strict Catholic sense. Later, I had my own crisis with all of this stuff. My mother got tuberculosis and I was sent to my grandfather’s, who was then managing a small nursery-a magical place-and I would talk to the trees and explain myself to them. All including my step-sister were wonderful and left me alone and let me get on with my life: no big gestures; just small gentlenesses. Of course one of the things that I learnt from my grandfather was the holiness of nature. He was especially well-known for growing anemones: I remember a Persian carpet of waving anemones when we went for a walk in the midst of this grey landscape. It was almost musical, and it was here that I learnt about colour, how it works, and how it should surprise you. You don’t learn this at college...

There, they always worried about my colours: muddy greens and browns and blues, and then–ding!–this tiny hint of secondary colour. Those colours I brought from Mullingar. I was drawing and painting from an early age, but I didn’t know that it was art! It was an intense, rich little world; yet full of loss at the same time. What I remember most was my mother’s sense of shame at our poverty—that terrible pride. The resistance though was staggering; and the alliance with the Church: all that pomp and circumstance amidst the greyness of the landscape. You get it in my work: things sing in corners.

It got noticed that I drew, and it began to weigh on me–being odd–and that put me further ‘outside’. I spent a lot of my childhood in silence. I dealt emotionally with this, armoured by my silence, so it informed a lot of what I did. I was a very fearful kid...distant and removed.

B McA: I vividly remember you telling me back in the 1980s, that you distrusted your facility with the hand so much, that you deliberately decided to paint and draw with your left hand. Facility has a positive as well as a negative connotation, so can you tease out the rationale behind this -and do you still adhere to it?

P G: I’ve come to terms with the so-called gift (Figs 3 & 4). I now have fun with it. When the gift was brought to my attention, it was a threat. I didn’t want to be seen, felt threatened by anything which highlighted me, and instantly ducked my head. I drew secretly, but every now and then I did what was expected of me and drew a gun or a cowboy hat for the lads in my class, or whatever. When I went to the technical college, an art teacher took a personal interest in me, stayed on after classes to teach me–I was twelve or fourteen–and I did art history and composition classes with him. I revelled in it.

I was looking for art and philosophy and was very hungry. He taught me stuff that has lasted my lifetime: art college was irrelevant. He taught me the language, the sensuality, of paint; that materials can speak. When I went to college, they honed in on the gift. The college had no emotional world and was just itself: a dogmatic nonsense. I listened intently to the arguments. Ironically, it’s a much more passive world now! It was to give me the kind of knowledge that was to crucify me. Everything was devoid of life and covered with a glossy sheen. It’s like...what! Who knows! That kind of knowing is dangerous! I was a frustrated dangerous lunatic for about fifteen years. When I let it all go, I recovered art and my own history, and a certain kind of knowing is dangerous and can imprison you. To be an artist, you have to have no art in you, to be able to let go of what you learned otherwise you can’t hear or see anything. I learned that stuff myself: from survival, you learn how it happens. It’s about wanting to speak as an artist: I was becoming part of that Irish art mythology of the failed genius and I lived in it and off it in my own lifetime. The great thing about the Independents was that they opened their doors to me, even though the stuff was terrible! I have a sense that art is sublime, and that it keeps us alive. It’s that Beckettian thing: I will go on, and on. In a sense there’s no form in front of you—I do believe that history is essential to art (6& 7). It’s the line of continuity in history that hints at the potential for transcendence in us all, time and time again (Fig 5).

B McA: You were at National College of Art between 1959-1963, before the revolution, so to speak. How did you find it? And do you think your life would have been radically different if you had gone there post-revolution?

P G: First and foremost, I wouldn’t be of the opinion that they were all idiots and fools. They knew they were coming to the end of an era. John Kelly was very warm toward me, and MacGonigal also. They were limited, and that’s what they had to offer. They were peering over the edge into something new and it frightened them, as if highlighting the academy’s failure. There were demands for conversation, discussion, books...We were an intense, small group of gifted artists, alongside the finishing-school types. It was teaching by practice and practice. The only engagements were with other intense students like Charlie Cullen, though I was a year or so behind him at college. Alice Hanratty was another. So the whole thing graduated out of college and into the pub: intense drunken conversations about what art should be. The college was supposed to drive you towards the Academy. It’s much more open these days. At that time it was ‘good’ academic drawing and tonal paintings: mostly academic rubbish. Painting by numbers, with a certain amount of grace. When I walked out at the end, I had no money. Nothing. I knew nothing about life and was barely qualified to teach. We were headless chickens. The soft option was to be informed by others as to what to do. Instead of painting everyday, one lived in hope; there was no money for anything else. What happened later on in the college was politics–look at how it turned out!! What they believed was avant-gardism was really trends, not the awkward bastard that was the avant-garde. The struggle to find a voice in art is a slow drip-drip, not a revolution. That’s what art is, but people learnt shortcuts: a knowing cleverness, in a reach for internationalism, instead of a process leading to what was more likely to be truthful in place and time. It taught us how to take on trends and appear graciously civilised...wanting to appear like them. We’re still at that. We’ve learnt nothing. One of the greatest compliments I received in America was that at last Ireland had a painter who was maybe as good as its writers...I always wondered why, when abroad, nobody ever mentioned Irish art.

By the post-revolution time in college I had realised that you couldn’t ‘buy’ art; it was a lifelong, not a short-term thing. I liked the long history behind and in front of me. I would call myself a socialist, though some people would call me a fascist! I didn’t think the college was about saving art, but rather saving a political ideology. Art doesn’t come from collectives. One person does it! Consensus is mediocrity. Art was always done by people looking in on the world and finding a voice to both challenge and rise above their place in it. That’s why I resent the politics of ‘there’s no such thing as genius, but only difference’. It’s a way of denying that skill or craft has anything to do with the making of art and that art is everything and for everybody.

B McA: Like Michael Kane you worked for a while in a Dublin advertising agency, and you also taught in the College of Marketing and Design. Did these activities have a negative or a positive effect on your art?

P G: You don’t confuse them! The advertiser’s eye has to be catchy—-like what your man Saatchi collects in London. That’s advertising, and it’s better if it’s slightly psychologically twisted and has a touch of humour. One great illustrator told me ‘I don’t do art, I do illustration’. It’s an end in itself. I knew I had the skill to do it: some of my stuff is still around. I did ads for beer and the like but I never confused it with art. With art, you have to find the mark the whole time, not have it off by heart (Fig 8). It was too important for me, to be deceived by advertising. I’ve enough gifts in my hands to do anything. It’s like running up and down the scales as a singer...but you don’t do scales on stage...

B McA: Your first exhibition was Notes from a Mental Hospital. Can you explain the title and give us some idea of the work, and the climate, within which it was produced?

P G: I had stopped painting and drawing for a long time. I’d say that I was a housepainter. I was too ashamed and embarrassed. My alcoholism was rapidly bringing everything down. Strange...the immense faith people put in a wasted life, and the hope they have for it.... I began to arrive in a mental hospital every six or seven months. You found a desperately black humour there. To relieve the tedium and the boredom, I started drawing. Some of the so-called maddest of people were the most sensitive. I drew this art-college, sublime grace-and-panache piece. You’re a tortured genius they said. It pointed up to me the utter failure of that form of art, and that’s when it began to dawn on me that I might have to let go of this. All my life I had been affirmed and lauded for this gift and facility, and here I was: could I let go of all that?

That was the beginning: another way to come to art. I had a clue with an exhibition of Noldes in the National College when I was a student there. I had an intense hatred of it: how dare someone be that honest and truthful! I started drawing a catatonic. I’d done a beautiful drawing of him, but I wanted to draw him as he and I saw him. I started crying and I drew, and everyone got embarrassed and went away. I showed it to the little fellow and I thought, for a brief moment, he stopped rocking, and we had a communion.

I went back to the figure, but tried to draw ‘away’ from it. The psychiatrist said ‘you have a tremendous potential. Up to now you’ve had failure’, whereas everyone else had just said ‘Pull your socks up!’ That’s why the subtitle of the exhibition is ‘Love Stories’. My history had brought me to this point. If I was to survive, I had to have no history and make a new history for myself. So I awoke one day, not having a notion as to what art was about. I still loved Goya, Piero della Francesca, the Van Eycks, Giotto, Cimabue...but it was the notion that these men did these things. Not ‘artists’.

B McA: I remember you once being very forthright in your negative attitude towards abstract–by which I mean non-figurative-art, though much of your work has often seemed to partake of an abstracting element. How do you view the sliding scale between abstraction and figuration?

P G: There’s a whole raft of art that I trust, whatever it is. I trust the men and women doing it; the process they come to. The end arrives without them designing it. Great abstraction is that process just as much as figurative art is. Great art hits you in the genitals and armpits: it’s a visceral thing and it gets behind the intellectual posturing. You learn to trust your visceral response to the man or the woman. The one thing art history teaches you is that certain knowledge can make you fearful and imprison you simply by the weight of its greatness. Good art is fearless, done regardless of the consequences. It’s in the stroke. I use the figure still. I love flesh and the eroticism of it (Fig 9). I could never let go of Piero flinging figures into space. How could you let go of Goya? The whole Collateral series is about the self-righteous pieties we throw at Iraq and the scabrous language of war.

B McA: Expressionism, and neo-Expressionism are dangerous terms, whether viewed though the lens of psychology or art history. As someone who has been labelled in this way, what is your ‘take’ on the term, and how do you view it in relation to yourself?

P G: It doesn’t fit, though if you like art in neat slices, it does. It eases the consideration you have to give to each painting. I remember looking for things that resonated with me. I used to find little buttons. I’d go to dress shops, and remember passing other shops full of sequins, and was immediately assailed with the smell of women putting on cold cream, starched skirts. You hack your way though the canvas and make a space. I didn’t want to paint in one way: I wanted to see what could happen. I’d put gold paint on, and people would say ‘You can’t do that’ they’d forgotten their history. You’re an expressionist because you have an aggressive brush-stoke! It’s compartmentalisation: an easy way to stop looking at the wonder of paint.
I learnt that the whisper is way more powerful than the scream. I love the whispering grey neutrals where you’re hit by secondary colour found in some of the work later in the 1980s and latterly in the Pieta/The Stags North Mayo (Fig 1) and others. I try to see what I do with the child’s awe of what’s in front of him; looking at the poetry of line. Leaving it open. Apart from Dermot Larkin, nobody taught me this stuff.

B McA: Viewing your work, I immediately begin to think of writers like John McGahern. Are you interested in, or influenced by literature of any kind?

P G: I would read a book for the one thing I’ve been waiting for. I have a huge collection of films. I don’t like scripts: I just love the image. McGahern has that quiet way of nudging you into areas that you’d really prefer not to go into, but you trust that he’ll put out a hand and lead you out. It’s the comfort of a deep faith in humanity. That’s why I love philosophy. We’re very good at talking art about stuff that everybody knows. McGahern wouldn’t let you know anything. He’s asking you questions all the time. We know the difference between great music and Pop but not between good art and bad art.

B McA: You were once an alcoholic, a state of being that conjures up a maelstrom of strong emotions, recriminations, and occasionally self-loathing. Without wishing to be either prurient, or naïve, it strikes me that there is a correlation between this and much of your work, say in the 1980s. Would you agree?

P G: Once you understand that alcoholism is being trapped in your own history, the only escape is delusion and madness and the terrible relief for an hour, of being bombed out, and not having to live with yourself...I had to look at art in another way, with no direction to it. I was coming out of a world of academic skill and so forth, so as to come into a studio and learn one’s art as though one were illiterate, and so let an inner world of fears, anxieties and lack of affirmation emerge, all of which had to be ploughed into the canvas. It came out. Some of the stuff was so awful that I hated it, but it had to be. I destroyed most of this work though.
Nolde’s gentler Expressionism I understood, this agonising beauty. I wasn’t distant from it then. I simply ploughed through it. Something reveals itself to me and I keep responding and responding. It’s a two-year cycle now, and out of a two years’ engagement, I’d rescue, maybe, ten canvases. Then there’s the intrusion of art, with my life: the public critique...and I start drawing. I have to empty myself. I walk into a wall of loathing again, praying for the emptiness where art comes from. I can’t shortcut the thing. I make awful work, some good work, and then I go to the wall and–bang! It’s agony coming into the studio. I make stretchers...I don’t do anything for as long as that lasts. But I’ve learnt that a moment comes. One day I walk in, I make a mark and say ‘That’s much more interesting than all the stuff you’ve been doing for the past two years’! That’s why I work in cycles and essentially in series.

Art reveals itself in exquisite little corners of difference. That’s what youngsters don’t know. It’s like the misunderstanding of Picasso. He did the same thing year after year—sex, death and so on—tried art for art’s sake and returned to the essential need in art to describe and transcend our limitations and to find beauty in darker places than the light of day presumes. I’m just trying to find the face of God before I die. Understand it all...It’s very ordinary stuff. It’s in the work.

B McA: I’ve always liked the image of Titian in his studio, constantly reworking his image, discovering the actual ‘disegno’ of the work by process, rather than by a worked-out cartoon. This means constant erasure: shape-changing, a mutation of all the elements, both an additive process and a subtractive one. One senses that the subtractive element, for you, has a psychological edge to it, rather than being simply the search for the right position of a limb, or the right colour combination. Can you elaborate?

P G: I kind of dream—I’m awake, I dream an image and I get excited. I will not do very much with it. I come into the studio with the excitement of what might be. The canvas is the door you hammer on. It opens. The thing is that, in a sense, you’ve seen these things for all of your life. I like the word ‘breath’ and think of relationships. Now you can’t make a picture of that. You carry the notion of the ‘breath’ and try to breathe on the canvas. I begin to look for symbolic references: a table becomes a great slab of County Mayo—and I start playing with it. Some images from the Somewhere Jerusalem (Fig 11 ) series and again the Mayo and Pieta series (10). Then it moves on. I’m as ignorant of what the process will deliver as anyone else. I see art as the process of opening up possibilities. There’s no solution or conclusion. There is a point where I lose the ego-consciousness of being in front of the canvas. Then I waken up step out of it, and then–that is the time that I have to be an artist. I can do things with composition that will hold it together. There’s a subversive element. I just want to hold it. Sometimes I work on it for years, scraping away and scraping away–and it costs me a fortune! I can spend e500 on the canvas any day! But there is a magic to it. The problem with talent is that it wants to show off, be in control, be the producer, director and author and repeat itself over and over in the safe knowledge that it is adored and utterly safe.
There’s a fatal flaw in all of this: my hands. You move to the full panoply of your gift and splash it over the canvas. The easiest way to do it is to paint the picture, the illustration, the nice bits, and nearly always it has to come off. You confront your facility, the emptiness of it, all the time. You see those drawings over there. I can say it; they’re exquisite—from the model or whatever. I will exhibit drawings as drawings because I love drawing, but it’s about my gift, an excuse for fun and exploration and very serious at times.

People say that there’s no colour on my canvases, that they are muddy. I was looking at bright yellows, scarlets, azure blues, semi-abstract canvases of rainbow colours in the 1950s—so where does it come from! Painting is a search for tangible truth and reality, albeit a transformed reality. Art has to have meaning and not just be art itself. Art is complete in somebody else’s eye in the way it resonates and echoes a real sense of being in the world. Then it is complete. When that happens I feel a quiet deep gratitude for what art is in me and in the other, the viewer. We both have acknowledged something without necessarily knowing what it is.

B McA: Words have often semaphored their way into your paintings. I imagine that you use words for a number of reasons. Firstly because paint itself is not very good at expressing concepts, but words are; and secondly because the words can anchor the emotional miasma of the paint, both intellectually, and in terms of pictorial design. Do you agree?

P G: It’s the same as the sequins! The evocative power of language. I love all language that tries to explain itself in a poetic way. We’re exquisite if we take the chance to look at ourselves. I’ve been using words for years down the road. I was once considered to be a poet, used to write an awful lot, loved the power of words and loved the bible for ‘I am the word’. I see words as paintings.

I also loved the rambling notion of word and paint embracing. We’re back to ‘talking to canvases’, with not even your ego listening. I write poems on them, and then get rid of them. It’s the process you’re getting, not the picture. I’ll give you pointers...The Amnesty painting or The Famine painting for instance: ‘I was here last year’ or ‘I took a deep breath’ - and I’ll write ‘breath’. I’ll start cutting out flowers [to put onto the canvas]. I want people to enjoy. I see them [the canvases] sometimes as being exquisite. My sense of beauty may be strange: what you’re looking into is the big space full of little things, an endless cyclical journey in and out of it...the journey we all hide. I am aware now that people are conscious of it, and so I’m less likely to do it. It was always supposed to be part of the painting. It’s whatever I need. Words are sometimes an introduction to a thought...white is only white because of black, only brilliant because of black...essential to the beauty of black.

B McA: It’s a critical commonplace to say that your work often seeks to demythologise sex, politics, and religion. In the eighties, this appeared to be a logical critical commentary but I’m curious as to whether you feel that it is still relevant. Put another way, when the context of society has radically changed, does the art have to change too?

P G: It wouldn’t have survived in the US or anywhere else, if it had been just that. My mother spoke to me at seventy, she was afraid of sex and the Church, and the only thing that gave her a voice was impending death. She only did what everybody else did–you couldn’t have an open view of life in that intensely controlled and frightened world of pious conformity, otherwise you’d be an outcast. This could have been seen in a particular light, parochial, native, but this aspect of humanity and the struggle to see in it a beauty and not the prison of a local history gave it a more universal appeal. For a time I did the Church bit and the oppressed bit...It was an easy way to blame people. But art helped me to mature. The stone-throwing, masquerading as art, was bad art. It became more interesting to look at possibilities, rather than the consequences...and it was easy to prop myself up by being pious. I know art should question and accuse, but I’ve a problem questioning vulnerable people like my own mother, her religion and her needs.

I changed, so it changed. The 1950s and 1960s were doors to the future. The stuff about sexuality came out: when you let go and fall into the pit, you’re enlightened or doomed! Art was the journey into something unknown. The early stuff wouldn’t have survived in America: the later stuff does.

B McA: The link to Brian Maguire, so far as I know, was instigated by Brian when he approached you to exhibit with him at the then Lincoln. How beneficial to you both was this at the time? Do you still see strong similarities between the two of you, then and now?
P G: I don’t think we thought of it as beneficial. We both suffered from the same consequences of our lives, being idealistic and naïve. There was a constant inquiry into art and life that made it a generous experience. It was great to have him and his support at the time. Then, I had no way in. Brian introduced me to Blaithin de Sachy. People had to be convinced that I might be a worthwhile risk. My return to art was humiliating in a way....there was something cruder about what I was doing; something edgy, obscene...I like the edge. There’s no other place to be, and it’s the company that I keep in my studio.
I was delighted to be able to get on the ladder. I was sick and tired of being stuck with me ‘the myth of the lost genius’...I wouldn’t have known where to start in the commercial art world, but for Brian. The Independents too, helped enormously. I liked Brian’s raw edginess; that he confronted drawing head on. I’m less sure of his painting, it seems settled, and he seems settled. I’d a different collection of problems. He had his solved. I was still arguing.

B McA: Have your working methods changed over the years?

P G: I’m much surer of what I do. I now tend to wait, and hang on waiting, for the mark. I have a physical disability, so I couldn’t just charge up with a bucket of paint. I still love an empty canvas, but I’m more considered about the work and the potential of it. I used to confuse agility with physicality.

I know I trust my use of colour now, and I’m sublimely at home in my greys: the whisper rather than the shout (Fig 12). I’m also much more confident about showing off in drawing. There’s a value in sheer virtuosity. I enjoy the things given to me. I still love the idea of knowing nothing in front of the canvas. I went to the library for art books when I was seven and eight, and was fascinated by the reproductions in the papers at Christmas. Then, I had to win prizes on the radio so as to get materials for my art!

My approach to materials goes back to Dermot Larkin who sized his own canvases and made his own paints. I stretch canvases still—I used to make the stretchers—I know how to mix the size, and I use five thin coats to build a surface. I never use gesso, a white surface, just raw size. It gives you the keys up and down the tonal scale and opens up the canvas.
I love oil paint, the whole craft base, and the honesty of it. I mix huge quantities of paint–see all of those cans? I remember once buying a box of oil paints, doing a painting of my sister, and I couldn’t wait to bring it to Larkin. ‘That’s not a painting’ he said, ‘that’s a drawing with paint! Don’t you know why a paint brush isn’t shaped like a pencil?’ He even taught me how to sharpen a pencil.

I use refined linseed oil. If necessary, I’ll put it on the window and refine it further. I make sure that I use the best of oil....not much point in loving history if your paintings turn black in twenty years time! In art colleges since the 1970s, none of this is important any more...
It’s a slow process. I dream a painting, walk in the streets, and I’m looking for something that I haven’t seen before. I always work in diptychs. I will either draw a horizon, which leaves me two worlds —the flat world, and the immense special world—and then I throw things at it. It’s a form of free association: looking for the connection to the grand idea, and then suddenly, something sings. Now that can last ages and ages: six, twelve, fourteen, fifteen months, because it’s intriguing. Your existence depends on the thing working out. It’s exhilarating, as in the recent The Stags North Mayo

B McA: Can art be more than colour-coded wallpaper decoration today and if so, why?

P G: In these times especially, it should awaken the age to its mediocrity, its lack of judgement and its lack of belief in art. This is the time to paint. You’re going to be that dreaded thing, an elite human being. Paradoxically it’s a great time for making art when we’ve reduced it to entertainment, when everything is art, and everyone is an artist. Community Art used to be called Occupational Therapy—and that’s what it was!
Art really is a religious notion. And the function of art is to redeem us in some way, whereas nowadays, we reduce everything.

B McA: You are one of only a handful of Irish artists who has had a regular US gallery, dealing with your affairs on a regular basis. How did you first come into contact with the Rutberg gallery, what has it meant to you, and what did you learn about yourself on the occasion of your retrospective at the gallery in 2002?

P G: I had a show at the Lincoln Gallery, in 1983 or so. I got a call from Leon de Sachy saying that an American wanted to buy all of the stuff and had been standing outside the gallery a half an hour before it opened and had a yacht in Dublin Bay and was taking the stuff back to England. His name was Vincent Price. He disappeared. About three months later a letter came, saying that it was important work and he’d love to see my work in the USA. He knew of one particular gallery he thought might be interested in the work. That was Jack Rutberg. Price had a huge collection of art, a permanent touring collection, a gallery, and he lectured on art. His acting was to support his art. He suggested that he’d contact Jack. Blaithin de Sachy, then owner and director of the Lincoln Gallery was brilliant at organising things. We talked to Jack, telling him we were going to the Los Angeles Art Fair. I’d had some work shown in Boston, so we decided to chance going over. We’d very little money apart from our own savings and some more from Vincent Ferguson at the Hendriks Gallery and off we went. We were given space at the very far end of this huge arena. We hung the stuff and waited, met Jack and were hugely impressed by him: Jack walked around, came back the next day with the painter Hans Burkhardt, and people began to dribble in. The French and the Germans and the like dominated the whole frontal area with their desks, phones, plush chairs yet within a day we were inundated. Jack offered to show the work at his gallery in LA, saying ‘Leave the stuff, I’ll look after it’. I do very well critically, over there. I like the fact that they talk about an Irish artist and Irish art, and sometimes even in the same breath as the Germans, French, Americans and others.

Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.
New work by Patrick Graham can be seen at the Hillsboro Fine Art Gallery, Dublin 19 May-3 June. All images ©The Artist