Brian McAvera: Sam, you were born in London, of Irish parents, in 1951, but didn't move to Ireland until 1968. So, as a boy, you not only had the good fortune to be in a major capital city, but by your teens, you were into one of the key periods in British culture, the so-called Swinging Sixties, which saw massive cultural changes in Pop Music, theatre, film, and the visual arts, as well as literature. Tell us about this period of your life.
Samuel Walsh: The most important aspect of growing up in London was that, if you had an idea, you were encouraged to pursue it, not stifled. We were all encouraged to be different, and being different wasn't thought to be odd. I was surrounded by bright images. The greyness of the 1950s turned into the psychedelic 1960s, epitomised by those areas you mentioned such as pop music and fashion. I wasn't that aware of galleries, but you couldn't be unaware of the social change. That stayed with me. I may well have in the past been discouraged in my ideas by other people, but I don't seem to have taken any notice of them!
I lived in South London, fairly close to the Thames. We went everywhere on bicycles or buses and I knew London intimately. The Science Museum, and the War Museum were of particular fascination, my father having served in the Allied Forces during World War II. Some of that military design aspect has permeated my work over the years: a slight jaggedness as in army vehicles. Paul Nash (and other painters during World War 1) had a tectonic element which isn't too different in approach from the work that I do myself.
In London there is a predominance of war memorials, like those of Frederick Jaeger, in dove-grey stone, with the figures in black bronze. I admired the design aspect of these and later in life, it came as no surprise to me that I used a reduced palette. I knew, from that type of monument, that it was possible to say a lot with limited means. When you grow up in an environment like London, with its cosmopolitan diversity, and its range of architecture, you see that as normal. It's much more interesting to go back as a tourist! The multiple layers, the juxtaposition of architectural shapes, the environmental spaces such as the squares of a city, are all an integral part of the way I've developed my work. For example, the juxtaposition of occasionally incongruous shapes so that I can see what happens or, as often as not, what happens between them. A rural upbringing doesn't have that dynamic.
B McA: You moved to Limerick in 1968 (another eventful year for world events): from the macrocosm to the microcosm; from sophisticated capital city to provincial quietude. Why did your parents move; and what was the impact on you?
S W: My parents referred to 'going home', which is the classic immigrant line. We went home for summer holidays and special occasions, so I saw 'home' as Ireland. My parents, I think, had always planned to return home. My maternal grandfather had died, my grandmother being left on her own, and so the next step was for my parents to return to Ireland.
I went to Villiers Secondary school in Limerick, for my final year, though it was not very successful as far as results were concerned - I think that I would have ended up in art school anyway. There were twelve in my first year at Limerick School of Art - the last time that there was a single class starting in the school. My contemporaries were Mike Fitzharris, John Gibbons, David Lilburn, Richard Slade, and John Shinnors, though he wasn't 'a full participant' in the school, and didn't qualify. Slade didn't either and neither did I.
I wanted to be an artist, not a teacher. The school was geared towards producing teachers. I was different, and that relates specifically to my English upbringing which was completely different to that of my colleagues in the school. In the first year of art school, I realised what I had left behind in London. That first summer I returned to London and went to art galleries. I was very frustrated, frightened to be measured against the wider world of things which seemed intellectually distant from me. The only academic aspect to my life was constant reading. I had an instinct to change things and so when I returned to Limerick I became involved in the first Students' Union in the art school, in exhibitions and so forth.
All across Europe it was a time of great change. Not surprisingly, in later years I was subsequently involved in the AAI, ev+a, and the National Collection of Contemporary Drawing. Someone has to do it, and it was instinctive with me. The work that I made in art school was predominantly influenced by British and American Pop Art. In a sense, it had already had its day. My work was done in an environment which was not very encouraging in terms of my choice of subject matter. I was surrounded by a pseudo-European painting tradition, and I was generally ignored. For a start, I worked bigger than other students. It was a form of parody ... no ... iconography ... no ... symbolism: using the colours of flags and with written quotes. There was a minor, if naive, political element to it. No one else was doing this kind of work in the school. It may have referred to 1960s Poster Art, which I was very familiar with, but I ran out of steam quickly. Around 1976, or a bit later, I went back to England and did nothing for two years, except go to art galleries. I worked for Decca, the recording company, and depending on whether Chelsea was playing at home or away, I either went to Stamford Bridge, or to an art museum.
B McA: Why did you become an artist? Were your parents influential in this choice? Do you think that the outsider status that you grew up in - the Irish in London - determined the kind of artist that you became?
S W: My parents were ambivalent: encouraging, but also hoping that I would do something else. The positive aspect was that they thought that I might become a teacher, and so have a respectable, social position. It was very late in my father's life when he expressed pride in me. I had a grandfather who was a carpenter, in Limerick, and he was seen as being gainfully employed, rather than a craftsman. My wider, maternal family of cousins has never been all that interested in art: (except for one male cousin and his family) my sister is not that interested.
I became an artist because I returned from England, married Ursula, and under pressure of gaining respectability; I took on a small business (the product imported, and slow-selling!). A very well considered choice! Then there was VAT at point of entry. The business was unsustainable. Ursula was teaching in the Limerick School of Art and had a full-time job so I sold the business, stayed at home and looked after the children, exploring the possibility of turning ideas into art. I was given an opportunity, did it, and enjoyed it.
We were not a part of the Irish community in London. My mother was Church of Ireland and brought up in the Anglican tradition, so in London I wasn't an outsider, but I was over here! It's absolutely necessary to be an outsider as an artist. You can attempt objectivity, but only get close to it if you are outside. You have to see the world in a different way from anyone else.
B McA: Let me rephrase the previous question into a psychological key. You very quickly became an abstract artist: conceptual, cool, formalist. Do you think that this was provoked by the combination of 'outsider' status being reinforced by the dislocation (cultural and otherwise) of the move from London to Limerick, resulting in a wary 'looking in from the outside' attitude?
S W: No. In fact, quite logically, it was a very direct development in the art itself. I was born with a skill for drawing. I drew all the way through art school. I could have done it for the rest of my life without a challenge, or I could step back and say: what else is going on? With me it was compartmentalisation: arranging things into squares, into spaces. In the end, I became more interested in the spaces than in the objects. So there was a development in the work. An intellectual choice. But it wasn't about the environment, or political circumstances or social dynamics: it was about preference. The level of challenge rapidly diminishes if you hang everything on the skill factor.
B McA: You have always said that drawing is natural for you, but painting is an effort. It's unconscious ease versus the hard grind of labour. One might read a moral attitude in here, in the Ruskinian sense - the honest labourer; or one might see the dislocation between 'ease' and 'graft' as representing the conceptual gap between experience and representation. How do you see it?
S W: Some people might find it easy to turn a drawing into a painting. I don't. To me they are different disciplines. The quest is to bring these two disciplines together. Sometimes it succeeds, and sometimes it fails, though there is no such thing as failure in art. I have come close to it in recent work such as the Phidias or Levant paintings (Figs 3&4). I defy anybody, any artist, to tell me that the movement of a stick of charcoal on paper is the same as the movement of a brush on canvas. It's not.
I am not intimidated by a blank piece of paper but I am deeply intimidated by a stark blank canvas. There's a more permanent idea or presence about canvas painting, than a drawing. Not that drawing necessarily wears out in time, becomes less, but rather there's a feeling of arrogance about painting. I'm aware too that I have an idea in my head of what the painting will look like. The work is to get it down as close to the idea as possible. Drawing is more immediate and flexible whereas painting is not.
B McA: Many abstract artists - I am thinking of Sean Scully, Felim Egan or Frank Stella - sooner or later start to allow 'expressiveness' to creep in, and often, like Scully or Egan, figurative readings, especially of landscape or seascape, start emerging. One gets the sense of an artist trying to escape from a potential dead end. Are you aware of any such journey in your work?
S W: Not especially. With reference to The Divine Comedy series, there were specific reasons for doing representational work. I go where the ideas take me. I'm not looking for a way out of what I'm doing. In every element of abstract art, there is a recognisable aspect. The challenge is to live with that limitation. Art for me falls into three basic categories: Still Life, Portraiture and Landscape, or a mixture of the two or three. All art can be classified as such, if you wish. I finished The Divine Comedy and happily went back to the 'normal' language of my studio work.
B McA: You've often said that you're not sure if you're a painter, which I kind of understand, in that many artists I know often question whether they are actually artists at all. What, precisely, do you mean?
S W: It refers to the previous question. I deal in ideas that are made into paintings or drawings. Success is based on the accuracy with which the idea is completed. In another context, another artist might pursue the idea in a completely different way, which is why critics have sometimes called me a conceptualist, without knowing why. Alan Charlton is a conceptual painter, but so what? Motherwell said that brown was for earth, green for grass and blue for sky. He had a very clear idea about what he wanted to make and how it would be seen. It's in Matisse and Picasso and Scully - I think Scully's work is to do with pace and speed, actually.
It depends on how you define a painter. I'm not the kind of artist who wants something easily read on the canvas. It's a platform on which an idea is pursued. There is nothing necessarily romantic in the way that I paint. Theoretically, under ideal conditions, I could just stand there and give directions to others to make my paintings but I would lose the concentration aspect, the personal sense of fulfilment, the enjoyment of making a painting. And I don't want to give that up. It was the technology that I was trained in. If I was born at a different time, I might have expressed myself in a different way but the fact is that, for the past thirty years, I've expressed myself as a painter.
I remember getting a present of an oil-stick. I'd never had one before. Just the smell of it was enough to get me involved in the medium. The atmosphere is a very important part of the way that I work. De Kooning was asked to make a painting for a TV film (Aidan Dunne told me this), so he started making strokes and splashes and when the filming was finished he tore it up and threw it away. When asked why, he said that it wasn't the way that he worked and, most of the time; he just looked at the canvas. I do a lot of that.
B McA: The Ambit paintings seem to me to be a major signpost towards your current work, in that their initiation and resonance derives from your father's war-time experiences, while their handling of paint, especially in relation to their use of glazes, harkens back to traditional renaissance techniques, as opposed to the mixed-media world that you grew up in. How did they crystallise for you, and how conscious were you of moving in a different direction?
S W: The drawings which related to my father's war-time experience emerged in the middle of the Ambit series of paintings. There was a linear element in the 'Airborne Drawings' that wasn't in the Ambits. Like a lot of things in my work, the original idea came from drawings. Where did they evolve from?
An earlier series called Arena had much sharper divisions of space, and was closer to almost black and white painting (Fig 1). In a sense the Ambit works harken back to this earlier series. The work also evolved from a series of paintings called Immotus (Fig 11) which related to ideas of stillness, and used invented objects to break up the space of the canvas. As part of their development I put these objects, four of them, on a stand or plinth, and in the process of development I pushed the objects closer to the edge, so creating an erratic shape around the two-dimensional plinth. If you think of the word 'ambit' there's no ambiguity. It's the encroachment of something into space. Personally, Ambit I, I thought of as being representative of a particular individual, deriving from when somebody had attempted to push me into a space, or otherwise encroach upon me in a way that limited my space (Fig 12).
B McA: So there's an element of remembered muscular response?
S W: To a degree. In the Ambit paintings the black area is a flat black. Colours are laid on in glazes. If you allocate an area that you call a 'space' you have to give it an identity. One way of doing that is to use glazes. Space evolving slowly. You can judge elements of depth in a refined way. You can't do that with washes, or with one colour.
If you make a decision to paint a large canvas, and most of it is black, you're already into a dangerous area in terms of your audience. What you do in the area that isn't black has to be interesting, otherwise it doesn't work. You can't let space look after itself. It can become vacant. Nothing's going on. They - the audience - often see abstract art as being simple, as something that anybody can do, but there's more ethics going into some abstract painting, than in some methods of representation, because you're keyed to the idea, to the process. You are your own quality control. It might have no longevity in its final look. There's lots of psychological things going on that people never consider. In that sense I feel an obligation to keep things simple but not simplistic.
If I let something out of the studio that is not fully resolved, I'm leaving myself open to letting people say that anyone can do it. A lot of soul-searching goes into my art. Like Charlie Tyrell, Marie Hanlon, John Noel Smith, or Richard Gorman, we all think long and hard before we agree that a painting is up to public view and can sustain audience attention.
B McA: For most of this new century you have edged your way into figuration, basing your new work on Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno and Purgatory, the first of which, especially, has been pillaged by artists as various as Botticelli, Rauschenberg and Tom Phillips. Both the Botticelli and the Phillips are quite startlingly cerebral, whereas the Rauschenberg is startlingly expressive. How would you describe your approach?
S W: There are two responses to that. My paintings are a reaction to reading The Divine Comedy. I was positioning myself, slightly behind Virgil and Dante, and I felt like a tourist, wandering through this literature. Take the two boys wandering through Hell. Hell, in the Divine Comedy, is a place which is heavily populated with people I didn't know. It wasn't possible to include all of the hordes who were wandering about Hell, so, as it is in my nature to reduce things to simple manageable forms, that is what I did, in the process of investigating how the forms could link together as part of a series; and how to create a template for the forms so that they would sit comfortably on the painting surface. What surprised me, when eventually I saw the Botticelli's, was that, apart from the crowd scenes, he had done similar things. Rauschenberg had tended to use expressive elements to create atmosphere, or else he used commercial advertising images to 'play' the parts of some of the characters. Phillips illustrated. So, to answer your question, it was a bit of both!
B McA: 'My form of abstraction does not lend itself to making symbolic ideas of people or things, so a thing is a thing, not a disguise for something else'. In the light of this statement of yours, what is the point of your sequence of works in relation to Dante, other than as a springboard to get yourself started? Dante's work is allegorical (and therefore symbolic), narratively driven, complex in allusion, complex in form, and clearly - in terms of the immediate response to his work, and its continuing impact over the centuries, of very direct relevance to particular kinds of audiences. You clearly have no interest whatsoever in 'illustrating' (unlike, say, Gustave Doré), so what precisely is the relationship of your art to his work; and is it necessary that the audience be aware of Dante at all?
S W: My work is not symbolic. Dante deals in simile a lot. I don't. An earlier series of mine, Fourteen Points of Entry, which is now in IMMA, is loosely based on the fourteen Stations of the Cross (Fig 13).
All literature has a structure. I look for the structure within the story, just as in the Stations of the Cross. I'm not interested in the symbolic representation of the Stations; rather I'm interested in the structure of the story. Similarly I'm interested in the structure of the Dante. I pare away all extraneous detail, all of the elements that I don't need in the literature, and what's left is the structure. In the case of the Inferno, it became a series of thirty-four pieces.
I'm not interested in illustrating. If I was asked to do it again, I would deal with it all in a completely different way. I would re-read, and find different structures. That's the nature of literature. There are layers in literature that I'm interested in finding, or breaking through, to find content for a work. I've done it at intervals. I've used religious works. It just so happens that religious stories have very strong internal structures. The construction of the story is clearer in religious stories than in other types of literature. Originally I thought that I would make abstract paintings on the Inferno, but the story element took on a different form. The painting Paradiso by the way is abstract (Fig 5). The audience can read all of it in many ways but I don't know the mind of my audience. I barely know my own!
B McA: How far do teaching, and your residencies abroad, impact upon your work?
S W: Teaching is something I used to do and now do infrequently and has little or no impact. I'm willing to do it, but am not dependent on it. Residencies however create objectivity, allow you to stand back from your work so that you can remove yourself from your space. I've just been invited by the Albers Foundation in the USA to take up a residency. It allows you to explore ideas outside of your usual environment. Because I work in series, all of these opportunities add to the sequential nature of my work. One thing leads to another naturally; to the receptacle of ideas that float around in the melting pot I occasionally dip into. That's a free cliché for your collection!
B McA: Is there any serious tradition of abstract art in Ireland?
S W: Yes. I have a personal theory. In the Irish historical context, literature is the art of revolution and change, which is why we have such a strong literary tradition. We had no coffee houses in which to discuss revolution and change, we had a public house culture that creates the illusion of solving problems. We also carried the burden of a history of failure in our attempts to change things, so there is an instinctive reluctance to change in Ireland, a social conservatism.
In linear art-historical terms, abstract art is about 170 years old, if we credit Turner as the first purely abstract painter (though he wouldn't have thought that). The abstract art we need to acknowledge in Ireland is something that reflects the New Ireland. It's more accurate than the simplistic images of a long-lost romantic past. In purely historical terms, abstraction was the first art that the Irish ever made, though they would not necessarily have called it Art. There are a lot of very good artists in Ireland; some of them make abstract work.
Irish abstract artists occasionally face a problem. It's to do with value. I think the media, the auction houses, the museums and so on need to take on board the fact that they can't be selective about certain parts of Irish art history. There's a general reluctance in Ireland to take a chance. People don't want to be 'wrong'. It would be an awful world if we were right all the time.
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