Here's an art-book with a difference. In readable jargon-less style, Ciaran Carty portrays the painter Robert Ballagh much in the manner of one of his own portraits. "I think artists should jump in at the deep end and experience everything," says Ballagh. "The more you experience, the richer your work will be. If you're going to deal honestly with your own circumstance, you must be part of it. You can't be on the outside looking in." True to his word, Ballagh has employed his status as an artist to speak out against injustice, racism and the abuse of power. His paintings are a dazzling iconography of Ireland during a period of hectic cultural and political change.
Drawing on unparalleled access to the artist Carty provides a lively account of Ballagh's suburban Dublin origins, his student days as an architect, his interlude as a popular show-band guitarist, and his unexpected breakthrough as Ireland's first pop artist in the late 1960s.No other artist in the 1970s dared make work that directly addressed the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in the eye-grabbing manner of Ballagh's subversive reworking of classic history paintings by Delacroix, David and Goya, while the satirical humour underlying his internationally-acclaimed series of people looking at paintings undermined the dogmatism of later modernism and its insistence on a self-contained art for art's sake formalism. Carty counterpoints this intricate crossover between Ballagh's aesthetic and political concerns by framing the book within a series of interviews recorded in his studio that provide a fly-on-the-wall account of the process of painting a particular portrait from the initial stage of photographs and sketches to the completed work.
Ballagh has painted over 90 portraits of the politicians, writers, artists, financiers and idealists, ranging from the controversial Taoiseach Charles Haughey and social reformer Noel Browne to veteran Communist Michael O'Riordan and author James Plunkett, that together represent a mosaic of the people who have made Ireland what it is today. Carty talks with many of them, in particular Dr. James D. Watson, the Nobel laureate whose discovery of the DNA double helix that determines the nature of life has opened the way for fundemental genetic research, and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams with whom Ballagh has been involved in art and community projects.A citizen artist, Ballagh has taken art out of the gallery to the people with his innumerable stamp designs and his designs for the Irish currency that was in circulation from 1992 until the introduction of the Euro in 2002. He has worked in prisons teaching art to the inmates while his involvement in community art projects brought him to Belfast to supervise the creation of wall murals during the Troubles.
The text of Carty's book is matched throughout by more than 200 illustrations of artworks including paintings, drawings, graphics, design projects and photography, which vibrantly illustrate Ballagh's remarkable achievements not only as a painter of intensely personal works, but as an innovative stage designer whose set for Riverdance helped turn Irish dance into a global cultural phenomenon."Robert Ballagh isn't a political artist but his art is made by an intensely political person," says the New York critic and artist Brian O'Doherty. Carty's entertainingly informal book explores this intriguing creative dichotomy to reveal a surprisingly private and gentle man who through his life and art has become a witness to history.Production Details Hardcover: 228 pages. Full colour throughout with 220 illustrations. Dimensions: 12½ x 12 inches Publisher: Zeus Medea Publishing ISBN 978-0-9525376-1-8 Available from all good booksellers.
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