“I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.”
Leonard Cohen
One night I was listening to ‘Up All Night’ with Dotun Adebayo – who had his monthly mental health phone-in on BBC Radio 5 Live. An old man phoned in and began to talk about his depression, how he had grown up in a care home and had been physically abused and unloved. His voice full of regret and sadness he told of his difficult fight with his demons, his recovery from depression, his happy early life with his wife and then their break up. Suddenly he said, for the last three years - he had been plunged back into black despair. Old childhood memories - which he had thought he had quelled and forgotten – had now re-emerged with a viciousness belying their age. Dotun wondered aloud how such a re-emergence could happen? Martin Seager the very wise psychologist co-hosting the show replied that it was in fact all too tragically common. Sitting in my bed - too stoned to feel my pain - I had to agree. I am a fucked-up boy - who became a fucked-up man. I spend my life trying to cling to certainties - and I fail every single time. My mind flails around with a thousand neurotic thoughts – just praying that my pre-psychotic thoughts do not come back too.
There is a zone upon this earth that my mind returns to like a reluctant witness. That place is Howth peninsula to the North of Dublin – in particular my mind returns to the house of my birth - Tara. Howth is not a bad place you might say – scenic, well to do and beautiful - but for me at times it was hell on earth. Many of these houses are in the million Euro price range - though there is also a strong working-class fishermen, farmer and rancher community in Howth as well.
Tara was built at the very start of the 1970s, it was at first a privileged home to grow up in with its; acre and a half of land, modernist design, flat roof, large glass windows, and trendy mix of conventional mahogany furniture with ultra-modern Swedish design and bourgeois knick-knacks, gold velvet curtains, Lladró ornaments, Capodimonte porcelain figurines of tramps and country folk, bronze sculptures of naked ballet dancers by the Italian born British sculptor Enzo Plazzotta and conventional though expressive oil paintings of the sea. I remember wondering as a boy why my mother who had bought all this art with my father – could hate my art so much. My friends liked to joke that Tara looked like the house in ‘The Brady Bunch’!
My parents lived on the second floor of the house, which had the master bedroom with large en-suite bathroom, very large living room cum dining room, main kitchen, guest bedroom, bathroom, study and a large enclosed outdoor patio. My huge bedroom with play area was downstairs along with another living room, kitchen, bathroom, and three spare bedrooms in which the various staff over the years lived. Just off my bedroom was a storeroom and on the other side of my bedroom was a door out onto the marble hallway and front door. Apart from my mother and father there were various housekeepers, governesses, au pairs, nanny's living with us. At the side of the house were two car garages where my father housed his Mercedes and my mother’s Toyota. Our house was on one of the main steep hillside roads leading up from Howth village and Tara itself was on a hill up from that – so were very isolated from others. This was fine - when our lives were protected by my father - but after his death it would come to haunt me. Because Howth was so exposed to the elements in the summer the cool breezes and strong sun were a delight, but in winter, the chilling winds cut through you.
For the first six and a half years, I lived an incredibly privileged and sheltered existence. Then one day in October 1977, while on a Christmas shopping trip in London with my mother – my father died of an aneurysm in the toy department of Harrods. From that day on - our lives fell apart. Our glorious home - which had been such a luxury - suddenly became for my mother an impossible burden.
This is where I have to get a bit boring because one of the oddest things about my childhood was its Dickensian mixture of conspiracy, insanity, poverty, wealth, legal battles, foster homes and starvation.
When in the early 1980s my half-brother tried to get the social workers to check up on us in Tara – they refused to believe that someone with our money could be living with no food, no heat and no electricity in a mansion in Howth!
I do not want to bore you with all the details of our legal affairs. However, a brief synopsis is required. When my father he died, he was still officially married to another woman whom he had three children with – so my father’s estate had to be divided up amongst four children and two women. This in a Catholic country that still did not recognize divorce - never mind have laws to deal with such situations. My mother was looked after well - she was left another two houses in Coolock, over £35,000 worth of jewellery and tenancy of Tara until I turned twenty-six – when I would inherent it. In the meantime, another house was purchased for me in Clontarf by my trustees, (my mother and my oldest half-brother), the rent from which would provide for my education and clothing. The combination of the death of my father, her legal battles with the estate, and the difficulty of looking after a small boy alone – all served to break my mother’s mind. My dad had been both a lover and father figure to her and after his death - she simply could not live without him. It was only for me that she went on living. Eighteen months after my father’s death - my mother was committed for the first time to a mental hospital.
Almost from the start, my mother started fighting with my half-brother, her own family - and her solicitors - whom she rapidly hired and fired. One week we could be jetting off to Spain or America on holiday and the next we would be renting out a room in a hotel in Dublin because my mother felt we were being spied on in Howth. Then she started accusing my au pairs of stealing from us, then her own family of stealing from us. Then the au pairs were fired, our family told to go to hell - and we lived alone. Then she said that my father’s family and her family were planning to lock her away and steal my money. Then she was in and out of hospital, and on and off meds, high and low, hysterical and loving, angry and fearful, paranoid and right. Then my relatives wanted me to give them permission to have her committed for life – I refused. Then one by one she sold her houses, our furniture, her mink coats (those we didn’t miss) her jewellery and eventually one week to Christmas and with no money she pawned even the engagement and wedding rings my father had given her to cover her shame. That is something I will always give my mother – she has always tried to put on a good Christmas no matter what. It is very hard to hate someone you love so very much. Though sometimes you need hate to survive. However, at some stage I think you have to let go of that hate. I forgave my mother years ago, but do you honestly think I can ever forget? Even if I tried I couldn’t. Even today new memories some sweet some sour - bubble up from the dark recesses of my brain.
So anyway, by the time we sold Tara in August 1983 it was in a sorry state and a zone of pure terror for me. When we left the grass in the garden had grown up to two feet high, rats ran around it at night, the roof was leaking, the walls were full of damp, the central heating didn’t work, the electrics were shot, and three quarters of the furniture and fittings had been either stolen by others or sold by my mother for food.
Tara is to this day my crucible. It is where I was abandoned me to an empty, cold and dark modern house with a mad woman. It is where the silver spoon of my birth was rammed down my throat so hard I gagged. It is where I learned to fear women, hate money, hate other people and hate myself. It is where I gave up on ‘society’, God and privilege – and ran the other way towards my fantasy world of art.
It was only in 1997 that I returned to Howth. I had not gone back since my mother and I had been forced to sell - because we had literally been starving on and off for three years - in the vain hope we could hang on to it. I returned only when at the age of thirty-one - my first girlfriend Helen persuaded me to go back. It was a moving experience, but mostly for what was not there – my past. The roads were still narrow, twisting, banked with thick grass verges and densely lined with wild bushes and high walls. My girlfriend commented to me that: “you feel like a trespasser on these roads!” The houses were large, dreadfully fashionable - and quite beyond my budget by then. After the exhausting walk up the hill of Howth, we came upon my old house. However, the Surrealism of Tara at that moment - was the banality of the ordinary - not the shock of the Gothic. Where was the evidence of my pain on the landscape? Where was my presence gone? It was then that I realized that the zone upon this earth that I returned to was in that part of my brain - that insisted on remembering my past. Moreover, no matter how hard I tried to put myself beyond my past - I could not escape it. When in 2012, I returned to view Tara (with my second girlfriend Carol) and found the house demolished and replaced by flats, I felt devastated. In my youth, I had dreamed of turning Tara into a museum dedicated to my art – now all I had were my warped memories.
Life with my mother in those days was like being in a twenty-four hour, seven days a week horror movie. Even the undoubted happy moments were only snatched from the chaos of my mother’s illness and our dire finances. I lived on edge day by day, monitoring my mother’s moods like an inmate eyes up a sadistic guard. Daytime could be utterly awful, but it was the night-time that utterly terrified me. I would go to sleep only to be woken up at 3am by my mother screaming and demanding my attention. We would go upstairs to the living room and I would try to calm her down. She would pull out legal documents that she wanted me to read, she would accuse her solicitors of corruption, libel, conspiracy and the illegal tapping of our phones. She would accuse my father’s first family of murder, brainwashing, bugging our home, killing our dog Misty, attempted rape – just about anything in fact - and the same went for her own family. All the while, I would try to reason with her. I was a bright eleven-year-old, but I was not a trained barrister, accountant, psychiatrist or priest! However, I really did try to make sense of it all. It was a futile exercise – I still do not understand. Sensing the irrationalism of my mother – I became a defence barrister to practically the whole of Irish society. Sometimes my attempts at reasoning - calmed her down – or at least made her question herself. However, usually it only made a bad situation worse. She would accuse me of disloyalty, betrayal and then start to attack me verbally; I was an ugly shit, a bastard, a fagot, a talentless idiot, a retard – she wished I had never been born and sometimes she wished she had aborted me at birth. The words I remember most – not the slaps that accompanied them. The first time I ever remember my mother mentioning sex was when I was about eleven and she claimed a man we knew had tried to rape her! Later in my life, she warned me to stay away from women who would manipulate me, use me for my money and were nothing but whores.
The crucible of childhood was where in compensation; I planned the defence of Howth with my army of imaginary soldiers whose movements I plotted on wargaming tables, I planned my entry into the army, I planned my career as a defence barrister, I rehearsed my interview with Clement Greenberg, planned my retrospective in MoMA, thought up my rejection speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature and planned the day I would be a sultan to a thousand women – who all adored me! What I gave myself in my mind – was greater than anything the world could give me – so I for once did not need it. I became so good at crawling into little cubbyholes, building camouflaged forts in the garden - and retreating into a corner of my mind - that still had hope. Amidst the chaos of my life - art befriended me and took me to a safer place.
It was at the age of about eleven I vowed to make the kind of art that a kid like me might need in the future! I imagined a lonely boy in the Hampton's on Long Island or in a country estate in Oxford - living a similar life to mine, coming across my work, and feeling just a little less alone - the way I had felt when I first read the wonderful Charles Dickens.
These days I have thought more and more, that my hatred and fear of women artists was the result of my mother’s demonic attempt to stop me painting. For years, she had been blithely unaware of my growing passion for art. However, by the time I was about ten she could not ignore it. Art in her mind was for queers and art losers. Her brother Bob had been offered a scholarship to art-college back in the 1960s - but their father had said over his dead body. Therefore, my mother seemed both repulsed and threatened by my creativity – it was somewhere I could escape from her presence – at least in my mind. She even blamed others in our family for encouraging this stupid ambition. For my mother my life would be a failure if I did not become either a barrister or brain-surgeon (it is odd - but it has just occurred to me that a brain surgeon might have saved my father and a barrister might have saved us.)
“Are you fucking retarded? Fucking scribbling on paper! You will never be a great artist! Your sister Avril got someone who works in NCAD to look at your work and she said you’re not a prodigy!” These were just some of the kinds of things she would say.
Then there was the day (probably in mid 1983) when I showed my mother my drawings – oil pastels of nudes, landscapes, still life’s, and a copy of a beautiful Renoir painting of his black haired wife breastfeeding. When she came across this, she said, “Oh is that me?” “No”, I said, “it’s my sister!” It was a knee jerk reaction – yes it was partly about my half-sister who had been breast-feeding, but the model with her raven hair - did look like my mother - but it was also a copy of a pre-existing image (like in many of my later works – I was working in a simple form of coded representation rooted to my subconscious.) However, I was not going to let my mother think I had wanted to paint her! She was a monster! “You fucking brat!” My mother screamed and grabbed a pile of my drawings and began to rip them up. I pleaded with her to stop - but she kept ripping them up. I sobbed uncontrollably – as my whole world fell apart in front of my eyes.
From that day on – I drew in secret from my mother - hiding my drawings under my bed - and later locked behind my bedroom door. From 1983 – 1989, I hardly ever showed my mother any of my drawings or paintings.
Another night - after another row - my mother smashed my favourite Capo-di-Monte figurine of a Bohemian artist painting out of doors. “You are not going to become an artist! Wasting our fucking money on art! Are you a fucking mad? They all think you’re a joke!” The worst thing is I think she was right – her views then are similar to those in the art world today.
By the way, do not get me wrong – similar things have happened to others like Chaïm Soutine and Egon Schiele. However, this is my childish egotistical sob story – not theirs!
So why the hell did I not stop! Why am I still painting? Because painting is entwined in my mind like a taproot. Most of my other dreams failed - because I had to bargain and compete in the real world to achieve them. I wanted to lead the Irish army – but I knew they would not let a twelve-year-old - just become General! I would have had to do years of grunt work! I could not become a defence barrister - because I could not even leave my bedroom, I could not become a sultan because – I could not find a single man, woman or living thing on earth to love me. So art it had to be.
Did it delight me when I read of so many male, white, geniuses - and hardly a single female? Perhaps it did. I thought of women as destroyers of male creativity, censors and judge and jury. I viewed women as predatory destroyers of men like Salomé, Judith, Medusa or the Sirens and ultimately as Femme Fatales like who sought nothing but male destruction.
So, in my art I listened to and spoke with long dead men of talent, originality and understanding. I had no father to teach me how to be a man, so these old masters were the closest thing to a male role model in my life. Their paintings spoke to me of a world of beauty, order, meaning and safety – so far removed from the life I knew. These artists took the manure of their existence and made something of beauty. Reading about the rejected and sometimes cursed life of painters like Géricault, van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani and Pollock gave me hope that no matter how hard the life of an artist was – something good could come from it.
As a child my mother never took me to art galleries, my mother didn’t put my drawings up on the fridge door, my mother never praised anything I did, my mother never hugged me, my mother never kissed me. So, when I see books like The Artists Way on book-shelves I nearly puke. I don’t make art because I have a God given talent, I don’t paint because I want to bring beauty to the world and I don’t need a book to tell me how to be creative – I need one to tell me how not to be creative! I do not need a pep talk to make me feel entitled to paint. I do not paint and draw because I think being an artist is an important, noble, sexy or cool activity – except for a few geniuses it is not. That is why I have almost come to hate the word ‘artist’ – it is the purest form of bollocks in most cases. I create because I can do nothing else and want for nothing else. I create because as the great English painter Frank Auerbach might have said - I have a lump in my head - and I have to get it out somehow.
Thankfully long before my mother’s death, I had forgiven her and we had established a loving relationship. I realized my mother was not a monster – she was the victim of schizophrenia. From about 1984 onwards - my mother had come to accept my vocation and bent over backwards to help me with money for art materials, art classes and art related travel.
However, I do not think there ever will be a time when I do not revisit the crucible of my childhood – pondering on how I became such a mal-formed flower. Everyone has their crucible – the locus of their misery. The crucible of childhood was where I prayed to God night after night - for salvation from our poverty stricken, insane, money-vomited life of shit. I prayed for my mother to get better, I prayed for food, I prayed not to be bribed with presents by my mother, I prayed not to be bribed with presents by my family, I prayed not to be hit by my mother, I prayed my family could all just get along, I prayed for the return of my dead father, I prayed that people would love my art, and I prayed for my dog Misty to come back to me. I prayed for a lot of things. Few of my prayers were answered.
My life as a citizen of Ireland ended in those years. My life has never really recovered. I live like an invalid outsider in a three-bedroom house - which I leave only a few times a week. I have no real ambition, no hope and no faith. I paint and write in the same compulsive way some men play chess, tend their gardens, collect memorabilia or take drugs in order to forget their pain. I have tried in my art to find answers to unanswerable questions and express the inexpressible – the taboo, the insane, the obscene, the illegal, the blasphemous and the slanderous – namely all the sordid reality of life that is never given shape in the sham of society or the distraction of art. Why? Because of the repressed rage of my childhood that went uncared for by others.