“For of course I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the esthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights… Some Australians feel that this is a confession of antidemocratic sin; but I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area – other than sports – in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm.”
Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir, London: Harvill Secker, 2006, P.31.
“What is wrong with modern art today – and we might as well say, what will be the death of it – is the fact that we have no strong, powerful academic art that would be worth fighting against. There must be a rule, even if it is a bad one, because the power of art is confirmed by the overcoming of taboos. Removing all obstacles, however, doesn’t mean liberty, [it means] licence – a shallow affair that makes everything spineless, formless, meaningless and void.”
Pablo Picasso in conversation with Christian Zervos in Cahiers d’Art, 10 (1953).
Despite the weirdness of my insanity, shock of my pornographic images, my occasional use of collage and my production of thousands of feckless doodles, most of my art in terms of its technique, craft and ethos - was essentially conservative. Moreover, as sceptical as I was of the so-called classics of Modern art – as a student of art history, I was also perversely in interested in the bad taste of some of art histories famous artistic failures like Hans Makart, Francis Picabia and Bernard Buffett and found their stories of financial success and artistic failure as illuminating as the endless stories of artistic triumph of the Modernist Masters.
My first introduction to art was through my father. As a wealthy businessman, he had just begun to collect art before he died when I was nearly seven. Our house had many lovely oil paintings of Irish landscapes, Chinese junk boats, lighthouses in Storm tossed seas, even a painting of the view from our house - which my father had commissioned. Dad had also collected a series of wonderful bronze sculptures of naked ballerinas by the Italian born British sculptor Enzo Plazzotta (1921-1981) - which heated up my fevered boyish imagination. We also had a charming collection of Italian Capodimonte figurines featuring bright, happy, and carefree peasants. My favourite Capodimonte figurine was of a French looking artist at the turn of the century - painting out of doors with easel, canvas, pallet, brushes and even Beret and goatee. I adored it. However, one night my mother while stark raving mad about my persistent and wilful compulsion to paint rather than study – smashed the little artist up on the ground in front of me. I was about eleven, but if anything, her actions only made me more determined to continue painting. I have a few of these art works now. My mum had to sell or pawn most of them when we were starving.
At about five my father taught me how to draw tanks and planes and put on their insignia - the British Target and the German Cross and Swastika. I would watch with envy as my father did his Paintings by Number canvas boards every Christmas. My father and mother first brought me to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin when I was about five.
The second introduction to art I got was through my father’s art encyclopaedia ‘History of Art’ (Editor Claude Schaeffner) Heron Books 1968. Which I first remember flicking through when I was about five - I was mesmerized and thrilled by Hans Memling, Mathis Grünewald and Hieronymus Bosch - as a young boy I was as shocked by their horrors, hells, and anguish - as by any horror-flick in later life. In 27 volumes, History of Art covered painting from the caves of Lascaux and Altamira to the Abstract art of Pollock and everything in between. However, my collection only went up to Surrealism because my dad died before the collection was completed.
Each volume had an introduction, then a main text, then evidence and documents, principal exhibitions, the principal pictorial movements, chronology, museums, and finally and best of all a dictionary of painters (including their short personal history and descriptions and dates of their best works.) This wonderful encyclopaedia on art - written by charming and eloquent French authors – was my constant companion since the age of seven. One of the most touching aspects of these books for me was the short artist biographies at the back. Looking through them I was astonished by just how many artists there had been - how we knew so much about them – and how so many had suffered to pursue their art. In my darkest hours as a child I dreamed that one day - I would be in such a lovely book on art.
Painters like Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Hals, Goya, David, Géricault, Ingres, Delacroix, and Degas - were like Gods to me. I knew I could live a hundred lifetimes and still not reach their pictorial genius. However, I would have given my left arm to have a tenth of their ability. Their art utterly inspired me - and it was by their standards that I judged every other artwork. These many artists formed the pillars of my temple to art.
Isolated, alone, and bewildered - I craved views of the world - greater than the sum of my small life. My eyes feasted upon masterpiece after masterpiece - each work broadening my understanding of life and increasing my wonder that such men could speak so directly from the grave. These dead white male geniuses became father figures for me - teaching me and challenging me. In their sorrows and joys - I felt understood and forgiven - I felt part of humanity.
Art became a substitute religion to me. The permanency of art seemed to cheat death and the posthumous rediscovery of the likes of van Gogh seemed to offer me hope in my caged social exclusion and silenced shame and hurt. My faith in art to cheat death - was finally shattered when I was nineteen and I began to compulsively read Existential philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger - and novelists like the Marquis de Sade, Kafka, Genet and Camus. Which combined with a suffocating depression - plunged me into nihilistic and suicidal despair. I had stopped believing in God at about the age of eleven when my thousandth tearful prayer had gone answered. God was my first big rejection. However, it was only when I started reading Existential philosophy that I understood what the implications of a world without God really meant. If there was no God - then my life was essentially meaningless. I would live a pointless and absurd life, die, rot in my grave and even the paintings I painted would decay to nothing. So, what was the point of going on, why kill time when I could just kill myself? If God was dead, then in cosmic terms as the Marquis de Sade pointed out - there was no difference between living a life of sin or a life of Chastity. Furthermore, if God was dead then art was a human joke! It was when I made this realization that I started signing my canvases 'Cypher' and began my Expressive cataclysm.
Only after my mother’s death, did I return to a hope in God and began to pray again. I could not bear to think my mother was really gone forever. These days I am agnostic on the nature of God or the afterlife. I think there are just some things I will never understand. Therefore, I continued to make my art in the sly hope of immortality.
My local library provided me with my third introduction to the world of art. Like many a crass amateur I read 'How-To' types of art books to learn how to draw and paint. These How-To manuals, encouraged me in my crazy ambition to become an artist, set me challenges to complete and gave me a sense of brotherhood. Such authors like; Charles Read who painted messy splashy watercolours (including his books, Painting What you Want to See and Figure Painting in Watercolour) J.M. Parramon (The Complete Book of Oil Painting and The Complete Book of Drawing), David A. Leffel (Oil Painting Secrets From a Master) who painted in a kitsch manner influenced by Rembrandt and Chardin and Gregg Kreutz his pupil (Problem Solving for Oil Painters) - all instilled in me a very conservative love for watercolour, drawing and realist painting.
They taught me the differences between artist quality paints (high pigment content) and poor student quality paints (mostly just filler), the value of expensive and highly durable French, Italian and English watercolour papers and the extreme durability of French linen and Mahogany board. Often these books featured the most technically accomplished old-masterish, realist, super-realist and photo-realist watercolour and oil painters. Like a child, I wondered at the hyperrealism of their work and the intricate nature of their technique. I also noticed that these new-age academics always used expensive and super durable supports like Arches 300lb (640gsm) watercolour paper and French linen. Therefore, I vowed that I too would make work as durable!
On TV, I avidly watched Keating on Painting on Channel 4. In this series of programs - Tom Keating who was the most famous English forger of the twentieth century - taught his viewers how to paint like Titian, Constable, Manet, Monet or Renoir. I adored his programs during which he chain-smoked and revealed the secret techniques of the old masters. He was by far and away the most technically accomplished and charismatic art teacher I have ever seen on television. A cockney from a poor family, he had tried to make a career for himself as a painter but had had little success. In revenge, he was known to have made fakes of work by Samuel Palmer and various European masters including Francois Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough, Amedeo Modigliani, Rembrandt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Kees van Dongen. He claimed that he had produced over 2,000 fakes in his lifetime. He was finally arrested in 1977, but the case was dropped because of his poor health. As a young teenager, one of my greatest ambitions saw to be a painting teacher on television like Tom Keating or in books like David A. Leffel. I still get nostalgic when looking through these kinds of books for enthusiastic amateurs - the same feelings I have when reading old comics.
Picasso for me in my teenage years was the yards stick by which to plan my own development. I adored his Cubist collages, Surrealist distortions, and his joyful doodles of later years. I loved his cheek in taking a bicycle seat and handlebars and making them into a bull’s head, by means of one witty weld. Despite the fact that I wanted to one day make such audaciously simple technical works - I firmly believed I had to earn the right to do so - just as he had – by drilling myself first in the rigors of academic, naturalistic and realist drawing and painting.
From the age of ten until the age of sixteen, I strove to become a classical painter in the mode of Ingres. However, as I mastered my technique, I felt my inner turmoil bubbled up to such an extent I could not hold it back any longer. The production of manicured classical images became more and more difficult for me as I fought against my psychological character – trying to control and manage my images. I made the decision that I had to make art that embodied my emotional turmoil – and were true to my condition.
One crass Modernist lie about American art I was tricked into believing in my late teens was that there was no great art in America before Jackson Pollock - which was brilliantly exposed by Robert Hughes in his epic on American art – American Visions (1997.) Pollock was a genius - a Promethean creative force equal in a sprint with Picasso (the trouble was - after 100m Pollock ran out of steam - while Picasso kept on running) but to suggest that he was the first or only American genius is ignorant and all too typical of the stupidity of Art College students these days. The oeuvres of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper in oils, watercolours, charcoal, or pencil were for me simply sublime - and the equal of better-known Frenchmen like Renoir.
In 2002, I underwent a terrible identity crisis, I felt I my art had gone into a cul-de-sac. My self-belief and vision deserted me after my exhibitions in the Oisín Gallery - and I was torn between the desire to continue to paint my transgressive images - and create saleable works that the public would like. So in a backward phase, I retreated to those artists I had first admired before becoming ‘Cypher’ and ‘The Panic Artist’. Alienated by the intellectual and symbolic mystifications of contemporary art, my reading material mirrored my conservative retreat as I devoured every art review I could find by Robert Hughes and Brian Sewell. I largely abandoned my Expressionist ethos and tried to retrain myself.
On Friday 2ed April 2004, I bought 1900: Art at the Crossroads the catalogue to an exhibition of the kind of Salon Art that was triumphant at the turn of the century before the ascendancy of Modernism. In many ways, 1900: Art at the Crossroads was one of the most important books I had ever bought, because it made me question the logic and authority of Modernist art history and whether I should even try to obey the current dogmas and fads of my time. 1900: Art at the Crossroads highlighted a period in art when Naturalism spiced up with a bit of Impressionism was triumphant even though its proponents would later be expunged from Art History. It was such a dominate style that in the exhibition, we even saw later pioneers of early Abstraction like František Kupka produce early skilled Naturalistic efforts. At the turn of the Twentieth Century most of the educated art public preferred the academic skills, comforting clichés, Nationalism, pretty and docile female nudes, and soft-core porn of the Salon artists to the ugly, difficult, and politically suspect works of the early Modernists. World-famous society portrait painters like John Singer Sargent, Giovanni Boldini, Joaquín Sorolla, and Anders Zorn with their flashy virtuoso canvases commanded prices the early avant-garde rebels could only dream of. Though in 1910, Walter Sickert damned them as the ‘Wiggle-and-Chiffon School’. These portrait painters alongside Salon history painters like Hans Makart, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema who served up cinematic spectacles in oil paint, were briefly the most famous painters in art history because of the advent of photography, newspapers, periodicals, prints, and touring exhibitions - which spread their fame far and wide. 1900: Art at the Crossroads was panned by many narrow-minded and dogmatic art critics at the time like Hilton Kramer and Michael Kimmelman who could not see the point of exhibiting the losers of art history. And Hilton Kramer in particular thought the exhibition was an insult to the heroes of Modernism and their advocates who had fought so hard to overcome such academic kitsch. But 1900: Art at the Crossroads provoked one of my favourite art reviews by Robert Hughes, who pointed out that while most of the work of these artists were dated, historically redundant, and even absurd, they had received a rigorous technical training beyond the abilities of most contemporary art students and could draw and paint far better than any of the incompetent art stars of our day. Finally, Hughes saw the exhibition of these feted art stars of the 1900s who were mostly now forgotten - as a warning to all the puffed-up art stars of 2000 – most of whom would also be forgotten within a hundred years.
Between 2002-2007, I was increasingly attracted to the work of the great Belle Epoch painters like John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Antonio Mancini, Giovani Boldini, Anders Zorn, Il'Ya Repin, Ignacio Zuloaga, Augustus John, Sir John Lavery and William Orpen.
Portrait painters like Sargent, Sorolla, Mancini, and Boldini painted the faces and hands of their sitters with great technical skill and a high degree of finish - but their clothes and surroundings with bravura sketchiness and apparent impulsiveness. In fact, if one looks at a close-up of a satin dress painted by Sargent or Zorn one might mistake their flowing gestural brushstrokes for early Abstract-Expressionist paintings! And the way a woman’s dress and in fact the whole room around her in a Boldini is suggested with lacerating, dynamic brushstrokes could make one think of Futurist canvases or even the gestural abstract paintings of Hans Hartung decades later. Finally, looking at the idiosyncratic way Mancini rendered faces and hands in a conventionally academic way but painted the backgrounds, clothing, and surrounding details with intense accumulations of impastoed paint, as much as half or three quarters of an inch thick, which he sometimes mixed with paper, foil or glass, one could easily be reminded of mid-career Jackson Pollock in a painting like Full Fathom Five from 1947, or even later society portraits in oil paint on broken plates mounted on boards by Julian Schnabel at the end of the twentieth century.
Despite the apparently casual and spontaneous look of their portraits, the Belle Epoch painters work was in fact highly skilled and calculated. Like many virtuosos, they knew there was nothing more exciting to the public than an artist making the extremely difficult look like child’s play. They believed that their first brushstroke was the most important and was the sincerest, so they were loath to make corrections. But their apparent directness was built upon years of academic training in drawing and painting from life, and their canvases were carefully planned. As such their work combined the skills of academia with a dash of avant-garde style, but they often only succeeded in angering both the conservatives who thought they were too casual, slick, and superficial and the rebels who thought they were too commercial and reactionary. However, they were adored by the rich all over Europe and America because of the glamour they imparted on their sitters.
The Belle Epoch roughly stretched from 1885 to its bloody end in 1914. The First World War marked the death knell of the Aristocracy in Europe. Monarchies collapsed all over Europe, the Czar his family were shot dead in Russia or in England lived to witness their power, influence and wealth deteriorate decade by decade. Similarly, a war was fought between modernism (the likes of Monet, Matisse, Klimt, Picasso, and Kandinsky) and the Belle Epoch painters of privilege, and the Aristocratic lackeys were strung up. Nevertheless, I found Belle Epoch painting delightful because of its marriage of traditional tonal painting with the bravura brushstrokes of Velázquez and the fresh colour of Monet. So, brushwork became a pet subject of mine to study and practice in my own art from 2007-2014 and I became fascinated with developing lush, beautiful brushwork at the expense of nearly any other quality like subject matter or concept.
Unlike the truculent and rebellious painters of Post-Impressionism like Paul Gaugain and Vincent Van Gogh, whose achievements came through perseverance, hard work and sacrifice, the master virtuosos of the Belle Epoch, were either child prodigies or students who thrived in the academic system and went on to have privileged and largely trouble free careers. The Belle Epoch painters were the last in a long line of Aristocratic painting stretching back to Velázquez and Frans Hals. The skills these painters possessed, were lost by the Second World War. The atelier training in tonal paintings and exacting life drawing with charcoal was lost forever, thus a chain of tradition was severed. The secrets and tips of this art, passed down from master to master, were gone. Portrait painting after the First World War was a story of clumsy self-taught painters making uglier and uglier representations of the face. One would be forgiven to think the sitters of Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Philip Pearlstein, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Odd Nerdrum or Jenny Saville were suffering from third degree burns or some hideous form of skin disease - very different from the flattering glamour and beauty of a Belle Epoch Duchesses in a lush directly painted Sargent oil painting.
Moreover, the painters who sat at this Belle Epoch court were the last to know what was required of an old master – reserve, dignity, poise, discipline, manners, and gentility- the same virtuous painters at court had needed since Da Vinci's and Raphael's day. That is why I and I think many in the art world are slightly disgusted by the recent art of the likes of Odd Nerdrum, he may possess the technical skills of an old master, but he has none of their psychological health, forward thinking, modernity, and dignity.
The Belle Epoch masters painted their bravura paintings fast and with flashy skills, that turned the sumptuous application of paint into a virtuoso performance, which both flattered the sitter and elevated the painter to the level of a maestro. Considering the quality and finish of their paintings they were prolific and worked with amazing directness. They had very successful careers, becoming compared with the old masters like Velázquez, became wealthy and part of the aristocratic élite they painted.
Their work has since been dismissed by the avant-garde, the Marxists who deplored their flattering of the elite and the worse still they became irrelevant to contemporary painters who never had the required training to paint in such a manner and were taught that the Belle Epoch was made acharonistic by Modernism. Yet, for the general public, they remain beloved in much the same way that working class people - who left-wing people think should know better - love the monarchy and its aspirational world of luxury and tradition. They are still particularly popular amongst amateur painters and frequently sited in how-to-paint books aimed at the Sunday painter.
Between 2002-2007, I felt my art had been seriously handicaped by my lack of technical training in drawing and painting. I would have given my eyeteeth for the training the likes of Sargent, Orpen and John had acquired. That is why in 2003-4, I returned to taking night classes in NCAD However, while these classes did help resharpen my skills, I realized that it was impossible to remove from my paintings the acquired mannerisms of a lifetime’s worth of clumsy, unsystematic, self-teaching.
One of my favourite minor painters of the Belle Epoch period who I had loved since my late twenties was Augustus John - one of the finest draughtsmen in history. His drawings in charcoal, pencil, black chalk, ink, and etching were wonderfully varied. There was incredible energy and directness in his drawings. This was real drawing, from life, directly and under a time limit. Some of his drawings of his wife Dorelie in a long dress had a timeless Renaissance quality. The faster he drew - the better he drew. Yet on the other hand, in obsessively shaded pencil drawings of friends and family he was the last old master of the hatched drawing. Sadly, his skill in drawing prevented him ever becoming a great painter - frequently in his paintings he was happy just to fill in the lines - leaving the pencil marks still showing underneath. Yet occasionally, he managed to pull-off small masterpieces in paint - particularly of his lovers and children - that had a freshness and lack of correction that was wonderful in it apparent simplicity.
My other great passion was John Singer Sargent. I had loved his work since I was fifteen. Sargent’s technique was stunning in its virtuosity - yet his vision remained superficial and uncritical. He was too happy to merely flatteringly record the appearance of things, to glamorise and idealise, rather than penetrate the surface of social reality. As such, his paintings lacked the psychological depth or humanity of his heroes Hals, Rembrandt, or Velázquez. Nevertheless, as a joyful and sensual celebration of the beauty of life it had no equal. That Sargent was a repressed homosexual was apparent when one looked at his smouldering charcoal drawings of male nudes. However, it was his gorgeous oil paintings of society women and his spontaneous watercolours of Venice and other landscape and architectural motifs - which were my favourites. Looking at his buttery bravura brushstrokes in his oils and his darting wet colourful strokes in his watercolours I was struck dumb with wonder and professional envy and as an art lover I was consumed with a lust for possession.
As a young artist, I had been attracted to the extremes of Modern art, yet during my conservative retreat, I turn against much of the art that had previously excited me. I became a tortured and two-faced artist, in love with tradition, yet at the same time in love with shock and transgression. My late attacks on some of the extremes of Modern art, were hypocritical, since although I painted pictures, my content had frequently been transgressive and my attitude brutish. Moreover, my inability reconcile these opposing positions only served to mentally torture myself.
This phase of my work would only come to an end in 2008 when I abandoned my attempts to please others (which had not succeed anyway) and to return to my Expressionist art of protest. I began to place content ahead of technique again and try to paint in as contemporary a manner as I could. However, I firmly believe that the retraining and retrenching I did between 2002-2007 - helped me in all my later work.