Brian McAvera: Patrick, you once remarked that 'Irish people generally are unable to look back and bury the ghosts of the past, though one is lamed unless one does it'. You yourself come from a half-Catholic, half-Protestant family, your father having a Unionist background, and being both a farmer and a businessman. Looking back, how far do you think the ghosts of the past penetrated the world of your art, and how far does that dark, psychic atavism which was so dominant in your work in the 1980s and 1990s, find its source in the fissures created by the emergent new State within which you grew up?
Patrick Hall: I think that the ghosts of the past are never quite totally buried: they have a way of remaining around the place. You can't close the door on the past. I suppose I've revised my thoughts. I do tap into ghosts for energy. Everything is a source of energy, including the ghosts. I'm a little more on friendly terms with them now.
There are energies from our parents, grandparents, from the mistakes of one's parents and of oneself, and they continue to energise the present moment for good or for bad. In terms of growing up, I'd say that the fact that we were comfortably off when we were small but financially broke in my teens was important. The fact that my father died when I was twelve; that it was a dysfunctional family in terms of alcoholism, all of these things played a huge part in relating to my attitude to painting, to myself and to the world.
I think that I was quite an angry person. Certainly as a child I had a very bad temper, though I don't have one now: you make peace with yourself to a certain extent. The midlands, where I grew up, is undulating country; not quite flat. I suppose that living now in Sligo, I have the sense of going upwards and inwards, into hills and mountains. That does lift the spirit. In those days Ireland was quieter and I cycled everywhere. I was really only aware of the dynamics operating within my family and those who were close to us, as politics weren't discussed very much. They don't feature in my memory, though they do now because my interest in history is obsessive. Any dark energies that surfaced in my family found some release in alcoholism. Apart from those negative energies I had a very peaceful childhood, though looking back on it, my parents, I think, were not happily matched. I think any national things that were going on (there were stories I heard as I grew up about the Civil War and the War of Independence) I only really became aware of when I became an adult.


B McA: You were taught for a while, by the painter Cecil Collins, when you were at the Central School of Art in London in 1959-60. Many years later you dedicated your retrospective exhibition and catalogue to your parents, brothers, and to Collins. He regarded painting as 'a theatre of the soul in which the mystery of the life of the soul is re-enacted', and in which the daily pettiness of life was exchanged for 'the deepest experience of reality'. How important was he for you?
PH: He was very important. At the time that I was becoming an adult - those particular years when I was coming out of childhood - I found him very inspiring: a sort of father figure. Maybe, being imaginative about it, he represented the father I didn't have. He was a person I admired - a man of few words - I don't think his painting is all that great but he was an incredibly good teacher and an impressive sort of man. I liked his silence. I liked everything about him.
His attitudes to art, the energies he brought to bear on art, these were his chief interests. He was a true, if not a great artist, if art is about truth and falseness, rather than greatness. Art is an expression of weakness; of what is not there. It comes from absence and from longing.

B McA: Going to Spain in 1966, where you lived for seven years, must not only have given you the shock of the new, but also the resonance of recognition. Light, landscape and an almost mythic machismo must have blazed with that suffering and darkness that you find in so much Spanish art. Why did you go? What did you gain? And what has stayed with you?
PH: I went because I knew someone who was teaching in Madrid. I wanted to get out of Ireland. So I stayed five years in Madrid, and then moved South when life began to get expensive in Madrid.
I gained an awful lot: the light is the most obvious thing, a deepening sense of history and the difference of living in a foreign country where you didn't know what the overall picture was: the tensions resulting from that worked themselves into my work and my life.
It's a huge question: the awkwardnesses and depths of Spanish painting compared to the Italian appealed hugely to me. There's a hunger in the Spanish psyche that I like which makes it difficult but satisfactory to deal with psychologically. I think it's a raw country. There's the sense of the desert that the Arab world brought to Spain. They were there for 700 years, and that tension between the Arabic and the European, between Islam and Christianity which peaked in Spain, is a huge factor, I think.
I'm not interested in institutional religion, but there is a large element of the transcendental in my work. I think the one fuels the other, from the sexual to the transcendental, and the fascination, the obsessiveness, with the Other. Everything I do is directed towards incorporating that sense of Otherness. I'm not happy unless that reverberation of otherness is there. That's the closest I can get to it in words and words quickly become an agenda, and I avoid working to agendas.
In Spain the parish priest would say mass on a Sunday but often live with a mistress. Nobody lifted an eyebrow, even though there is that doctrinaire aspect of religion as the tool of empire-building, but that's not about one's relationship with the divine: it's about power. I'm doing a series of paintings now on the desert aspect of things. There's always a human figure in the context of the desert in my current painting: that sense of merciless light, of these vast spaces (Fig 1). It's the geographical rather than the religious aspects that interest me. It's about openness, a sense of space waiting to be explored (Fig 8). One of my favourite authors is Wilfred Thesiger, who spent his life exploring the desert, and his relations with desert peoples. The idea of bedding down for the night in the middle of a vast desert is very attractive to me. It's a classic British thing, about the comradeship that the desert brings with it: you're so small in relation to the space that you are in. I like the idea of the smallness of the human figure in my painting in relation to that space - for example a tiny figure at the bottom of huge walls. Those walls started in the midlands when I was growing up: inclusion and exclusion. A wall is an image. It's the way that my hand makes these things. My mind doesn't. I remember once, in London, a Japanese girl said that she liked my paintings but not my drawings. I didn't draw for ages. I love how the paper begins to reverberate when you draw a straight line across it. It's like the desert: one light shower and then there's green.

B McA: The Irish aren't very good at exploring their sexuality, if one is to judge by most Irish theatre and most Irish art. Your work seems to me to be rooted in a quite intense sexuality but, like any medieval mystic, poised between self-disgust and sensuality. Is this a reasonable comment?
PH: I would say sensuality. Self-disgust is too strong. I don't think self-disgust informs my sexuality. Being homosexual, you are running against the current; you are at odds with everything in your society. Unconsciously at first. I've always used my sexuality which is a huge energy for me: it incorporates aspects of my own character. I use it as such. I tend to incorporate an obstruction in the work; to being revealed that is. I use barriers, like those walls I grew up with in the midlands. My own solitude is very important to me.
There was an awkwardness in my family, which I put down to political reasons. If the British administration had stayed on in Ireland, it would have been much happier for my father. That bloody-mindedness of his should have been different - he was very interested in sport, but the awkwardness that's in my painting, and my not being accepted (as an artist) earlier, is perhaps wilful. I didn't accept myself earlier, so how should others do so?
When I stand in front of a canvas I don't know what I'm going to do. There's always an element of surprise in a good painting. The known is not interesting for me. There's a huge area of myself that is desert, and I would like to have more time to explore it.
The sensuality? Yes. The self-disgust? Maybe it's alienation. My sexuality is transgressive and therefore there is a certain obsession and devotion to the transgressive, and that crosses over into a certain characteristic that I inherited from my father. He was stubborn and didn't conform, and the political energies that informed that stubbornness became sexual energies for me. The older I got, the more I came to accept my sexuality, the more interesting it became, and the more I tapped into its energy.


B McA: I once wrote that you were uneasy about interpretation, that you discouraged specific readings of your work, arguing that 'ambivalence is in the nature of things'. As I remarked then, William Empsom's comment, in Seven Types of Ambiguity was that purposeful ambiguity had to be separated from the random kind. As you get older, do you see your ambiguity as being purposeful, or simply multiple choice?
PH: Even the patterns of words violate reality. Anything we do is an approximation of reality. There are huge areas in the reverberation of any word, any brushstroke which are open to multiple interpretation. The specifics of existence, of life, are closed. At the same time, in paintings, I do have a specific thrust. At any one time one idea, one thought, one feeling is dominant.
Each piece says something different to each viewer - it's a dialogue, a little epiphany. The viewer brings their history and interpretation. However specific we try to be, a painting is not like going into a bank to see how much money you have in your account. Painting is a gateway to freedom.

B McA: I'd like you to tell me a little about your changing attitudes to colour and to 'readability'. For instance, an early work like Andalucian Garden (c.1969) with its bright greens, yellows and oranges and its shallow space, loosely brought into focus by simple linear structures, is reminiscent of painters like Dufy, Matisse and Bonnard, and is eminently readable (Fig 5). Work of the 1980s and 1990s is darker, more inscrutable and difficult to read, while Passover Door 2005, positively shimmers like a Howard Hodgkin, being recognisably figurative, but being in equipoise with an abstracting tendency. How do you see your development in these areas?
PH: The earlier work, such as the work done in Spain reflects Spain: less shadow and bright colour. It allows for fewer variations in 'reading', you might argue. Back in Ireland it became more monochromatic. Passover Door (Fig 9) is a biblical story: the blood on the door posts. There's even a bunch of hyssop at the top of the painting. That's all it is. It's a biblical story and the painting is faithful to the specifics of the story.
When I was younger, my emotions were perhaps simple. For example, Andalucian Garden. After that, my feelings and reactions became more complex as I began explicitly to incorporate sexual and darker energies. It became clearer to me - as I got older - what were the areas that interested and excited me, transcendental and other that guided me in the use of colour, and the fact that in the 1980s I was using inferior linseed oil. The paintings were oozing it! Now I paint very often in monochrome. I'm becoming clear as to where my energies are focused, and what things empower me. My emotions are more vertical, intense, solitary.
The moment of death is getting closer. It's an exciting moment and it energises me. I was always interested in biblical stories. The Bible is like a great painting and has gone on being interpreted. It has caused wars and bloodshed, yet there is a simplicity in its stories. Some years ago (I wasn't well and was depressed) I was reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows, trying to grope again for happy feelings. Likewise the biblical stories are a source of happiness: they create an emotional world for me which is complete. The effect of the Bible, emotionally is huge É those stories send a frisson down my spine É they touch a well of truth like being a child, playing in the yard in a world that is intact. We all try to get back to that completeness. It's the human story.


B McA: Thinking of paintings like Mountain (1994), or Burning Mountain 2 (1994), how important was Anselm Kiefer for you?
PH: I like some of his work. His sense of history appeals to me - the way it reverberates in a lot of his paintings - but Burning Mountain 2, which is about the idea of fire, I associate with my reading of an Austrian writer Hermann Broch. I've read all of his novels. One was about the fire at the heart of the mountain: a potent image for me. The skulls, I think, are partly clouds: they're the same shape. They're also like stones: the clouds landing on earth. They also correspond to a certain emotional truth.
I'm fascinated by skulls (Fig 7). At the corner of every cemetery in Spain there is the Osario where the exhumed bones are kept - a mountain of skulls and bones and you can go rooting around and pick up what you like. Rooting around Spanish cemeteries impressed me visually and emotionally. They are symbols of death, pictorially, aesthetically, and morally meaningful. They whisper in one's nervous system.

B McA: Despite overly figurative works like Man Holding a Flower (2007), drawing, and specifically figure drawing, is not what one would immediately think of when conjuring up a Hall work, yet I imagine that the craft, the discipline, the hard-won articulation of your imaginative images owes much to the continual pressure of translating the life model from flesh into charcoal or pencil. Is this so?
PH: Yes. It's part of my continuous weekly work. I do it less so now when I'm in the country as it's more difficult getting models, but when I was in Dublin I did it every Friday for ten years continuously, and I do it now whenever I get the chance. Drawing is fundamental: it broadens the vocabulary of the hand. The memory of the hand is amazing. One of the benefits of growing older is that there is less hesitation: your hand knows what to do. The physicists tell us that our bodily cells have their own intelligence.
I think that when you are painting you are discovering it. You are waiting for the canvas to speak back to you, like a sculptor with the stone. There's a moment when the curtains draw back and an image, or a presence emerges. You may lose it, but there is a painting there. Leonardo said once that he would lie back on his bed and look at the stains on the ceiling for inspiration, or if you just turn off the light and dwell on the shadows. There's a quality between light and dark, about the power of light in relation to dark. The images that inhabit the light come out of the dark, just as the day comes out of the night.

B McA: When I think of a work like White Heart (Fig 6), I think of Hieronymus Bosch - that complex geography of disgust, sexuality, and aberrant religion resonantly articulated on the canvas. But when I come to, say, End of the Inferno (Fig 4), the painting seems to have relaxed into a resonant simplicity. Do the demons still trouble you?
PH: In a different way - maybe. End of the Inferno is related to the last canto of Dante's Inferno, and it's about the sheer joy of emerging from the underworld, seeing the stars again.

Brian McAvera is an art critic. All images ©The Artist.
Patrick Hall, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 10 October - 6 January 2008.