Robert Ballagh
Robert Ballagh is an Irish artist, painter and designer. Born in suburban Dublin, Ballagh's initial painting style was strongly influenced by pop art. He is also known for his hyperrealistic renderings of Irish literary, historical and establishment figures, or designing more than 70 Irish postage stamps and a series of banknotes, and for work on theatrical sets, including for works by Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, and for Riverdance in multiple locations. Ballagh's work has been exhibited at many solo and group shows since 1967, in Dublin, Cork, Brussels, Moscow, Sofia, Florence, Lund and others, as well as touring in Ireland and the US. His work is held in a range of museum and gallery collections. He was chosen to represent Ireland at the 1969 Biennale de Paris.
A lifelong resident of Dublin, he was made a member of Ireland's academy of artists, Aosdána He became the founding chairperson of the Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation. He has received a number of awards, including an honorary doctorate from UCD. He has published a book of photography of Dublin, and a volume of memoirs.
Early life and education
Born 22 September 1943, Ballagh grew on Elgin Road in Ballsbridge, the only child of a Catholic mother, Nancy, and a Presbyterian father, Bobbie, who converted to Catholicism. Both parents had played sport for Ireland, his mother hockey, his father tennis and cricket. His father was the manager of the shirt department of a drapery shop on South William Street; his mother, who came from a comfortable middle-class background, stopped working when she married. Robert attended a private primary school, Miss Meredith's School for Young Ladies on Pembroke Road, and then the fee-paying St Michael's College and Blackrock College. He became an atheist during his secondary education. His parents were members of the Royal Dublin Society, one of Ireland's most active learned societies, and he spent time in its library and looking at its collection of art books, while also collecting American comics and frequenting the local cinema, not just to watch films but also observing for hours the sign painter at work. He began to work on art seriously in 1959, and some of his early works, including a self-portrait, were later exhibited as part of a retrospective show at the Gorry Gallery.After passing his Leaving Certificate, Ballagh attended Bolton Street College of Technology for three years, studying architecture, including with Robin Walker, who had worked with Le Corbusier; he concluded that this was not the career for him, and that it conflicted with his musical career ambitions, while his tutors found him excessively interested in designs beyond his briefs.
Career
Before turning to art as a profession, Ballagh was a professional musician for about three years, initially with the showband Concord, then, on a full-time basis, as bass guitarist with The Chessmen, managed by Noel Pearson. Having toured Ireland and England extensively with the latter band, reaching a weekly income of 100 pounds, he concluded that a career in music, especially with a lot of time on the road, was not for him, sold his guitar, to rising musician Phil Lynott and did not play music again.Painting and other plastic arts
Ballagh worked in both Dublin and for a few months, London, as a draughtsman, a postman and a designer. Having decided to return to Ireland, he started on a dedicated artistic career after he met an artist friend, Micheal Farrell, freshly returned from the New York art scene, in a pub, and Farrell recruited him for 5 pounds a week to assist with a large mural commission. The piece, for the National Bank branch on Suffolk Street, was painted at Ardmore Studios due to its massive scale. Two early pieces of three-dimensional art, an erotic torso and a pinball machine, were selected to appear at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1967, and Ballagh has appeared in a range of group exhibitions since. Around the same time, Ireland's Arts Council purchased an acrylic of a razor blade on canvas, inspired by a theory of critic Clement Greenberg. Largely self-taught, his early work took inspiration from the pop art movement, and he worked on two early series of paintings, the Package series and Map series, the latter using a mix of acrylic and day-glo paints in inkblots. He next turned to political themes, notably connected to Northern Ireland but also with elements inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the US and the reaction to the Vietnam War. He started to combine elements of social realism with US advertising forms after reading Che Guevara's essay Man and Socialism in Cuba. He also produced three early works which have remained critically recognised ever since, inspired by Liberty at the Barricades, Third of May and Rape of the Sabines. In 1972, he commemorated the victims of Bloody Sunday in Derry with an installation at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin; it consisted of thirteen rough figures in sand on the floor, sprinkled with blood, recorded as a series of photoprints.He was selected to represent Ireland at the 1969 Biennale de Paris, and his work has been shown in solo exhibitions from that year onwards. He was commissioned by his former tutor, Robin Walker, to produce abstract designs for screens in the new restaurant building of University College Dublin.
Ballagh started to work on portraiture with Irish contemporary art collector Gordon Lambert in 1971. As he was at the time still not fully content with his skills in painting faces and hands, he merged his own canvas with a silkscreen headshot of Lambert, over which he worked with sepia ink, and he added the hands in detached three-dimensional representations, which sculptor Brian King made for him from castings of Ballagh's own hands. Over the following years, he painted a series of people looking at contemporary paintings, which proved very popular, with some international exhibitions selling out. Using the same concept, in his first major public commission, for the Five-Star supermarket chain's new shop in Clonmel, he painted a large-scale mural on 18 panels. He used formica, and included himself, his wife and his daughter in the mural, entitled People and a Frank Stella. He also, drawing on scenes from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by locally-born Lawrence Sterne, painted a series of panels for a local restaurant. Other work included a series of six paintings and a silkscreen print linked to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.
He later painted fellow artist Louis le Brocquy, writers J.P. Donleavy, James Joyce, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, as well as poet Francis Ledwidge, singer Bernadette Greevy, politician Carmencita Hederman and a rendering of Fidel Castro. The Ledwidge, commissioned by the Inchicore Ledwidge Society, is a triptych, with the poet primarily on the central panel, but his arms crossing to the outer panels, which feature a scene from his home village of Slane and a World War I scene. He had earlier painted Joyce in a scene on O'Connell Street, Dublin's main street, with himself alongside. Some years after buying Ballagh's The History Lesson, the scientist James D Watson visited Ballagh in Dublin to discuss a portrait commission, and the Ballaghs visited the Watsons at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, with Ballagh commenting on the new insights into the world of science he gained from the visit. Ballagh worked on a portrait of Watson over an extended period; it hangs in the Genetics Institute of Trinity College Dublin. At Watson's request, Ballagh painted Watson's colleague Francis Crick for a major institution in London, and at the unveiling was one of just two people to meet the Queen, who commented that the portrait was "interesting". Other commissions included Dublin City University purchasing a portrait of former Minister for Education Mary O'Rourke. By 2010, Ballagh had painted 91 non-family portraits, featuring 82 men and 9 women.
Works of self-portraiture and paintings of his family have also been created over time. One of these, Inside Number 3, described by Eamonn Ceannt as moving on from "the conventional architectural perspective of his previous paintings" and marking "a turning round of his own approach to painting", featured his wife as a nude figure on a spiral staircase in their home. That work was preceded by No. 3, with his family portrayed conventionally outside their house, and was followed by Upstairs No. 3. This was a second intimate portrait, with a mostly nude Ballagh ascending a spiral stairway, seen from the perspective of his wife on their bed with a book of Japanese erotica; he commented that he really felt that Inside Number 3 called for a response, and that the needed male nude had to be himself. Later still he painted Inside No. 3 After Modernization, Upstairs No. 4, and others. In a very different setting, he also painted his family on an extended 1978 holiday near Malaga, in Winter in Ronda. He also used himself and family members as models for generic characters, and, for example, painted two pictures of his daughter in homage to Marilyn Monroe, Rachel as Marilyn I and II.
After many years, and one painting looking out to an exterior scene in the mid-1980s, Ballagh started to paint landscape work seriously in the late 1990s, and his 2002 exhibition, Tir is Teanga / Land and Language consisted of 10 landscapes, albeit not of specific places, but typical of some Irish scenes. Another commission was to paint the Fastnet Lighthouse for the Commissioners of Irish Lights.
Ballagh has served as a judge for a number of artistic competitions, including one for murals in West Belfast. He has also led community arts work in both Dublin and Belfast, and taught art in prisons. One community art project in Dublin, to make a massive mural placed in front of the Custom House, was the subject of an RTE television documentary.
Alongside Cathy Henderson, Ballagh was selected by NCAD and the Services Industrial Professional Technical Union to create a work to tell the story of the 1913 lockout in early 2012. The project, a tapestry series, that was completed in October 2013 and opened by President Higgins at Liberty Hall, Dublin in November 2013.