Bill Griffin - the Oilman of Allihies

 

 

A slightly edited version of this profile appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 19 June 2016

The North Mon in Cork in the late Fifties was a fine breeding ground for hurlers but not for artists. Its robust and philistine regime did not encourage such airy notions. The young Bill Griffin had an aptitude for art but little outlet for his fledgling talents. When Griffin tried his hand at a few nude studies via two compliant cousins ("who were into art") his efforts were uncovered by a Brother correcting an English essay. Physical retribution followed as the skill of the drawing did not compensate for the flagrant inappropriateness of the subject matter.

Griffin grew up in Blarney Street in comfortable circumstances. His father was a dental mechanic with literary leanings who enjoyed an occasional pint with Frank O'Connor in Phil Moynihan's bar in Sunday's Well. His earliest encounter with art was seeing his father make little models from spare plaster. Like many artists he is mildly dyslexic and left school at 14 : "there's not a word in the English language I don't know how to spell a dozen different ways." Over the next few years he took a series of short-lived jobs while trying his hand at drawing and painting. He began mixing with real-live Cork artists such as Willie Harrington, John Burke and Maurice Desmond in Kealy's (a long-gone bohemian bar close to the old Examiner office). He showed one of his sketches ("a little drawing I was proud of") to the famously irascible Burke (then teaching in the Crawford College of Art). Burke tore the sketch into pieces in front of him saying: "don't give up the day job". Griffin didn't actually have a day job, having been sacked recently by Ford's, but discouraged he headed for London. Cork lads of his generation knew the route well: the Innisfallen to Fishguard and the train to Paddington.

His art aspirations caught up with him again in London. He was arrested for smoking marijuana and was incarcerated briefly in the cells of Marylebone Police station. There he bumped into Henrietta Moraes, muse and model to Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, and later girl-friend of Maggie Hambling. She was in for burglary. They had a brief affair, or as Griffin puts it "I banged a tune out of her". She introduced him to the Colony Club and to Bacon and his set. Bacon sneered at his paint-splattered shoes telling him "you don't have to have paint on your shoes to be an artist". Griffin's ready wit didn't let him down as he responded "it does if it's your only pair." He found Bacon unfriendly but became particularly close to George Dyer, Bacon's ill-fated boyfriend. Dyer was a snappy dresser and he passed on clothes to the impecunious Griffin. "When I came home to Cork I was wearing Dyer's suit with a yellow shirt and pink tie". But life in London was hard, a spartan studio in Ladbroke Grove proved too expensive and survival became moot. He headed up to Yarmouth to work in the burgeoning off-shore oil drilling business. Art was pushed into the background as he found he had an aptitude for rig work: "I loved the physicality of it and I understood the technology better than the Yanks."

Oil exploration began off Kinsale in the early Seventies and Marathon Petroleum was looking for labour locally. Griffin was a step ahead of the posse. The legendary tool pusher Gerry Gunther hired him as a roughneck, based on his brief Yarmouth experience.The oil business, like the IT business today, is a true meritocracy and if you're good you'll thrive. Griffin quickly moved from roughneck to derrickman, from derrickman to assistant driller, and then to driller. He developed a particular expertise in directional drilling, whereby the suppleness of the drill string is exploited to enable you to drill almost horizontally as well as vertically. This arcane skill took him all over the world - initially working for American companies but eventually he bought two oil rigs and worked for himself. A downturn in oil prices killed off this business and he quickly discarded his overalls and donned a business suit - travelling the world as an oil consultant. He ended up in Iraq working with the Irish company Bula Resources on the Oil for Food scheme.

On his 50th birthday he decided to quit. In Iraq he had witnessed at first hand the corruption involved in the oil business and the suffering and death that resulted amongst the ordinary people. "I suddenly saw the kind of industry I was in and I didn't like it." He resolved to return to Cork and have a go at the art thing.

His old Kealy's friends Harrington and Desmond were supportive. "Willie (Harrington) was by far the most sympathetic" and "Maurice (Desmond) helped me sell paintings." He took no art classes but just rolled up his sleeves and started painting. He literally rolled up his sleeves because after some initial dabbling with paintbrushes he decided he would paint exclusively with his fingers - "ten digits yearning for expression". It's not a technique that's common in the art world. "It just became easier for me" he explains, "I can use ten different colours at the same time if I feel like it". His first break was in a group show in Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral - where the Dean Michael Jackson (now C.I. Archbishop of Dublin) became an early supporter. He was spotted there by John P. Quinlan of the Vangard Gallery. Quinlan gave Griffin his first opportunity by offering him a one man show. Quinlan explains: "I did so because I liked his story and wanted to give him a break". Griffin remains grateful: "to this day I appreciate what John did for me".

He then made a fortuitous trip to Allihies. His brother has a large house there and he came down to paint for a week. That was nine years ago and he's still there. He met a local teacher, Deirdre Ni Dhonnchadha, and they both liked what they saw. "I think I landed on my feet" he says with a smile. She's also "a virtuoso tin whistle player" he informs me proudly. Ni Dhonnchadha is the niece of the legendary fiddle player Denis Murphy, Sliabh Luachra royalty.

Griffin is burly, he's bearded, he's bushy-haired, he's wildly unkempt, and he's extravagant in word and gesture. What characterises him most is his unwavering good humour and his infectious enthusiasm for life in general and the arts in particular. His role in Allihies is far more than that of another artist plying his trade. He seems to function as a kind pf power station for the arts in the parish. He organises the annual pantomime, he writes and performs one man plays (which he tours abroad), he organises exhibitions for himself and other artists in the Copper Mine Museum Gallery and he generally adds to the gaiety of nations. At present he is involved with Ni Dhonnchadha in running the annual Michael Dwyer Festival in honour of the renowned tin whistle player who lived locally.

Coming to art by an unconventional route and not caring a lot about the niceties of technique and compositional decorum, Griffin is often described as an outsider artist - or even by some as a naive artist in the manner of the Tory Island school. While Griffin doesn't quite bridle at this suggestion, he is quick to dismiss it. "I think my work is very sophisticated". He featured in Gemma Tipton's exhibition of outsider art in the Crawford a few years ago. "It was me she picked as her anchor tenant". He is not short of venues for his work and when he's not showing at his local Copper Mine Gallery has shown at the Triskel, the Vangard, and the Crawford in Cork, and at the Wexford Opera Festival. He sells well, his current show sold 13 pieces on the opening night. He bats aside all attempts at interpretation of his painting. He sees these ostensibly representational works as pure colour exercises. "In essence if you turn them upside down they will work as abstract paintings"."It's all about getting colour on the canvas". I point out similarities to the work of James Ensor but he says he's never heard of him.

For his current show Griffin tells me that he is "using the whole village as a gallery". The 60 odd paintings are on display at the Copper Mine Gallery, O'Neill's pub up the road, and a disused schoolhouse nearby. Wild and scenic Allihies is worth a visit at any time of the year but if you get down there in the next few weeks you will have the added pleasure of entering the colourful world of the Oil Man of Allihies.

The Copper Mine Museum Gallery

Allihies, Co. Cork

Mon-Sun: 10am-4.30pm

Tel.: 027 73218

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Glimpses of John Montague

 

John Montague is well into his eighties now and his public appearances in Ireland have become a rarity. He spends most of his time in the kindlier climes of Nice and only returns to his West Cork house during the summer months. He's inclined to sleep in the comfort of a B&B in Schull and use his house near Ballydehob to work and to organise his archive. Anytime I have seen Montague in the last 20 years his current partner has been pretty much welded to his side. She's a diminutive and rather intimidating American woman called Elizabeth Wassell. She's quite extraordinary looking: a tiny figure with great watchful eyes, a lubricious mouth, and a tight skull cap of dyed red hair. She's something of a novelist in a minor key but her role in life is clearly to minister to the great poet and control access to his presence.

I have bumped into Montague from time to time over the past 40 years. He was a lecturer n the English department in UCC while I was a student there. I remember him bringing a sexual dimension to Wordsworth's poetry that caused some fluttering in the dovecotes - especially in the serried ranks of nuns. Montague found Wordsworth's Nutting a particularly juicy source of speculation.

Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets,

Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook

Unvisited

Montague mingled with the students socially and particularly with the College poets including Sean Dunne, Theo Dorgan and Greg O'Donoghue. I'd often see him in Henchey's pub in St. Luke's with Sean Lucey, the Professor of English - a charming man whose life sadly went off the rails later.

Montague's arrival coincided with my last year in UCC and I moved on with my gentleman's degree in English and Philosophy. I didn't encounter him again until about 20 years later when I was staying in D'Arcy's B&B in Wellington Road in Cork - a raffish venue much favoured by artists and writers. I was informed when I checked in that Montague was in the next room to mine - Claire D'Arcy assumed correctly I would know him. There was no sign of him that evening but after I returned from having a few pints with my old buddy Maurice Desmond in Henchey's it became clear that he was back in his room. The next morning we went down for breakfast and the bould Claire marched us straight over to Montague's table so we could breakfast together. Montague was as courtly as ever and introduced us to the new girl friend Elizabeth. We discovered at breakfast that we were both heading to Skibbereen for an art exhibition so I agreed to give them a lift. He was waiting for me on the steps outside at midday - sitting in the sunshine reading to his new girl from the collected poems of Thomas Hardy. Nice. We enjoyed a pleasant journey south punctuated with a pit stop in Rosscarbery for a pint. It had turned cold and I remember how solicitous Montague was towards Elizabeth - proffering her his jacket as she shivered fetchingly. I didn't see much of him in subsequent years apart from occasional encounters in the old Shelbourne Bar. He always stopped for a chat and was unfailingly affable. He never lost that mischievous twinkle in the eye.

Over a year ago I was interviewing the artist Colin Davidson for a profile I was writing for the Sunday Times. Colin had done portraits of most of the North's leading literary lights: Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Michael Longley amongst others. I observed that he had omitted Montague from his pantheon and he agreed but said the reason was he had difficulty getting hold of him. I said I'd see what I could do to enable a sitting to happen. Given Montague's age it was tacitly agreed that it should be sooner rather than later. I knew he lived in Nice for a lot of the year so we would have to get him on one of his summer visits to Ireland. I got his Nice number and email address from Theo Dorgan and sent off a speculative email. A number of phone calls and emails ensued. Apart from a very brief word with Montague all of the dialogue was conducted with Elizabeth. There was a window of opportunity in late August when they were in Schull through which Colin could climb. More of which anon but in the meantime I got a chance to see the great man in action one more time.

An old UCC sparring partner, Eamon O'Donoghue, arranged to bring the poet over from his French base to do a reading during the Claregalway Garden Festival. The bold Doctor O'Donoghue had bought and heroically refurbished an old Norman castle in the town and this was the venue for the reading. I met Montague beforehand. He was having a glass of white wine and some cheese in an anteroom to the castle. Elizabeth sat by his side gazing up at him adoringly the while. Around him were clustered an artistic elite: Brian Bourke, Mary O'Malley and Jay Murphy amongst others. He looked frail but still retained that roguish twinkle. He's never been the greatest of readers, his mild stutter often intruding, so I was a bit apprehensive about how he might perform. It seemed good that he was taking the precaution of having a few glasses of wine beforehand for fortification purposes. I needn't have worried. Inspired perhaps by a very large audience, or the wine he continued to drink, he gave a fine robust reading - even cracking the odd joke. He began with that very slippery and sexual poem The Trout, which he dedicated to the memory of his old buddy Barrie Cooke. He also did that beautiful tremulous love poem All Legendary Obstacles:

All legendary obstacles lay between

Us, the long imaginary plain

The monstrous ruck of mountains

He continued through many of his best known poems, including Like Dolmens Round my Childhood and concluded with Landing, a tribute to his current wife:

"beside whom I now belong . . . my late but final anchoring”

There seems something wrong with that metaphor - a hint of captivity perhaps - but who am I question the great poet.

After the performance they inflicted the usual book signing debacle on the poor guy. The last I saw of him was with his tiny wife and the estimable Mary O'Malley who were supporting him on either side as they led him to the car that would take back to the hotel. The sailor is definitely home from the sea.

A couple of months later the portrait sitting happened in the Grove Guest House in Schull. Colin Davidson was granted an hour during which he took photographs and did a number of his preparatory sketches. The sitting went well according to Colin. Apparently the two Northern boys found common cause in their stutters - Colin also has a mild and not unattractive stammer. I look forward to seeing the end result. A museum or academic institution in the North or in Cork would seem apt. Or perhaps a benefactor could buy it for the Writer's Museum.

I had hoped to get an interview with Montague while he was in Schull but I was made aware by Elizabeth that I had used up my time allotment. In fact Lara Marlowe had done an excellent piece on him in the Irish Times not too long ago and I'm not sure I could have improved on it. She asked him the one question I would certainly have asked. It was the same question Montague asked Samuel Beckett in an interview just before he died: "Tell me Sam, looking back, has it all been worth while?". To which Beckett replied in the predictable negative, adding "and what's more I watched my mother die". When asked the same question by Marlowe, Montague was less bitter but did intimate that things could have been easier for him materially. A bit of a surprise that coming from a man with a winter retreat in Nice. But perhaps he feels underappreciated - that some of the rewards and plaudits that decorated his old buddy Seamus Heaney could have come his way.

 

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Eilís O'Connell: Profile of the Artist

 

A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 3 May 2015.

You turn right off the Inniscara Road between Cork and Dripsey to get to Eilís O'Connell's studio - a converted creamery perched on a hill. The large and handsome steel gates open into a property well-furnished with examples of her formidable art - a stern woven steel piece here, a curvaceous purple and blue creation there. Their presence a surreal shock against the lush green backdrop of the Lee Valley. In this bucolic location one of Ireland's most successful artists creates her internationally acclaimed sculptures.

When the history of Cork's philistinism about art is being written, the saga of Eilis O'Connell's Great Wall of Kinsale will surely merit a chapter. The desecration of her 1988 sculpture has been well documented - the local council (amongst many other transgressions) painted over her corten steel structure despite her specific instructions not to do so. She is still angry nearly 30 years later: "It was torture, the whole thing was torture. I get physically ill passing it." During the subsequent controversy she had stones thrown at her, her car tyres slashed and was even refused service in some shops by the good citizens of Kinsale. It's ironic indeed to look over her career since that protracted debacle and see that the offending sculpture proved to be the foundation stone for her success at home and especially abroad. It was responsible for her winning the competition that led to her monumental Secret Station in Cardiff Bay. "I was taken seriously in Britain due to my 1988 piece The Great Wall of Kinsale. They could see that I worked big. They loved it, and I got great credit for it."

Her string of subsequent high-profile commissions in the UK include Vowel of Earth Dreaming its Root, in London Docklands and the award-winning Nyama in Bishopsgate. She has particular affection for her playful Pero's Bridge in Bristol. "That bridge is mad." She sees it occasionally as a backdrop in English TV programmes. "I get such a kick out of that." She also continues to reap a rich harvest internationally. In 2002 her large bronze Unfold was lent by the Cass Foundation to the Venice Biennale and her smaller sculptures were shown at the Guggenheim Museum. She has also shown at the Paris and Sao Paolo Biennales and is currently trying to finalise a large project in Hong Kong. Leaving Sean Scully to the Americans, there is a very strong argument for declaring her our best-known and most successful artist on the international stage. She hasn't been idle at home either. Since moving back to Ireland in 2002 she has completed Reedpod a 13.5 meter sculpture for Lapps Quay in Cork and her recent polished mirror steel tribute to E. S. Walton in Trinity. She is amongst the blessed of Aosdana, a founder of the Cork Sculpture Factory, a former member of the Arts Council and a long-standing member of the RHA.

Born in Derry, O'Connell moved to Cork with her family when she was ten. She always wanted to be an artist (three of her uncles painted) and pestered her parents to send her to art classes at the Crawford College of Art when she was 12. Later studying at the Crawford she came under the influence of the sculptor John Burke. He was a charismatic and influential teacher and an enthusiast for the hard-edged abstraction of David Smith. Burke's own career was dissolved in alcohol - a not uncommon fate for a visual artist in Cork. O'Connell's early work was influenced by Burke's modernism but she evolved into her own woman - with a sensibility more drawn to organic forms. She remains grateful for the encounter however, recalling with a smile his shouting "the fucking worst show you ever did" across a crowded Hendrik's Gallery opening. A typical Burke incident. Another Cork artist who influenced her was Maurice Desmond - for the example he showed her in living the life of the artist without compromise. "Maurice was the only full-time artist in Cork at the time. He showed me that it could be done." After a distinguished student career, various awards and fellowships followed. She was determined to broaden her horizons: "As a young artist I was always desperate to get out of Ireland." She was granted a fellowship at The British School at Rome in 1983, and a P.S.I. Fellowship for New York from the Irish Arts Council in 1988. After New York she won a two-year residency at Delfina Studios in London. "Delfina Studios were amazing, every 6 months we had to open our studios and I got to know people very quickly and started applying for shows and commissions." She ended staying in London until 2002 - settling in Deptford. Then a tragedy disrupted the smooth flow of her career. In 2001 her long-term boyfriend Herbie died suddenly. She was thrown by this event: "I had never been unhappy before". She felt the need to return to Ireland and to the support of family and friends. For a while she couldn't work: "I did feel that I'd never make another thing." But eventually she got back to work (completing a gravestone for Herbie) and adjusted to her new life. "I have discovered that solitude was the making of me." Although back living in Ireland, O'Connell has no romantic notions about the place. She doesn't particularly embrace being Irish: "My nationality is not an issue - I feel European." She maintains that "Ireland is a very hard country to be an artist in."

She looks outward to the international scene: "What's Gormley doing? What's Kapoor doing?"

There are two strands to O'Connell's career as an artist. In addition to the public and monumental side that makes the money, there is the smaller work that is best demonstrated by her critically acclaimed Haptic show at the RHA in 2011. Her larger works are created in her spacious well-equipped studio and adjacent barn. She is the first artist I have ever met with her own fork-lift. She also has a small studio on Crete where she creates smaller hand-worked pieces.

"The quality of light there is incredible and the silence of no power tools, I look at everything in a different way. I have no materials only the local amazing beeswax, in a way, the limited resources have given me great freedom."

She always thinks big - seeing virtually all her small pieces as scale models for larger works. "Almost every single thing I make is a model for something that could possibly be made big." Her public work she sees as a way of counter-balancing the ugliness of much modern development. She describes her large piece in London's docklands as "an organic antidote to a very ugly location". She prefers her work outside in the real world - subject to ageing and weathering. "In a museum it's like still being in the head." She sets a lot of store on the after care and maintenance of her public work and bemoaned the appalling state of John Burke's graffiti bedecked sculpture at the Wilton roundabout in Cork. "We have a whole culture of non-maintenance."

It's hard to pin O'Connell down to any particular style or school. There's a hint of Brancusi here and a touch of Henry Moore there (look at Sacrificial Anode in her Haptic show) - and now and then she goes back to her more hard-edged mentors such as David Smith and her late tutor John Burke. She is a restless and eclectic artist often just going where her experiments with materials take her. She is constantly playing with the possibilities of bronze, steel, epoxy resin, mirror polished stainless steel, and even Kevlar - the carbon fibre material used in bullet-proof vests. She once took possession of 1.5 kilometres of stainless steel cable. After leaving art college she worked for a while with hand-made paper - a medium she revisits occasionally. A striking example can be seen in the upcoming RHA annual show. She does what she feels like doing and what she did yesterday may be radically different to what she does today. She refuses to be a predictable, easily marketed product and pours scorn on artists like Tony Cragg who "keeps doing the same thing because he has to supply 55 galleries".

Most of the small bronzes in O'Connell's current show in Hillsboro Fine Art originated in Crete but were finished in her Cork studio. Some suggest teepees and she concedes that "the forms are about refuge and shelter". But she is impatient with those who look for metaphor or meaning in any specific work: "It has no significance whatsoever. It's just a yoke." A statement that typifies O'Connell's lack of arty preciousness. The title of the show is Khôra - a particularly slippery Greek term. You can travel from Plato to Derrida for a definition and still be none the wiser. Perhaps Martin Heidigger's formulation is the most applicable: a "clearing" in which being happens or takes place. O'Connell's work is equally difficult to define. She cannot be confined to any particular "ism". It is abstract but often with figurative resonances. It is classically severe but often with sexual intimations. Perhaps it's best to conclude that her sculptures exist, like Platonic forms, purely as things of beauty for our restful contemplation.

John P. O'Sullivan

 

 

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Shinnors Selects

Susannah and the Elders by Jack Donovan

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 6 April 2014

John Shinnors is not a big fan of abstraction and the term conceptual is not permitted within his artistic lexicon. So it's no surprise that this City of Culture sponsored show has engendered some injured merit on the Limerick art scene. High-quality figurative art dominates - demonstrating his love of the old virtues of drawing and painting. The exhibition is confined to those associated over the years with the Limerick School of Art and Design, ether as students or as teachers. This embraces the venerable such as Jack Donovan and Tom Fitzgerald, the established such as Donald Teskey, Michael Canning and Diana Copperwhite, and relative neophytes like Nuala O'Sullivan and Gillian Kenny. Particularly eye-catching were an early work by Jack Donovan and Lorraine Wall's powerful homage to de Kooning.

Shinnors modestly omitted himself from the show. But there is a splendid piece of his on permanent exhibit in the gallery so perhaps he felt that sufficed. No sign of the Cork maverick Maurice Desmond either - another fine artist that emerged from the Limerick School.

Church Gallery
Mon-Wed: 9am-9pm
Thu-Fri: 9am-5pm
tel: 061 293870


John P. O'Sullivan