Talking about art

Movers and Shapers 3: Conversations in the Irish Art World

Ryan’s subjects have included the politician Charles J Haughey and the arts activist and writer Dorothy Walker, two of the most influential figures on the scene in the late 20th century. The fact that both have since passed on demonstrates just how valuable it is to have a record of their views on Irish culture.

The third and final Movers and Shapers opens with an interview with the veteran Northern Irish painter Basil Blackshaw, and goes on to feature the architect Ronald Tallon, gallerist Suzanne Macdougald, auctioneer Ian Whyte and the critic Aidan Dunne, among others.

Blackshaw is a great character, “a rare boy” who grew up working with dogs and horses in Co Antrim, and once took to the roads of the North in a horse-drawn cart. He fetched up in the yard of a pub in Ardglass, and stayed for two years. Blackshaw was later the illustrator for the Field Day company, producing posters for plays by Brian Friel et al that he happily admits to not having read. He recalls producing a portrait of Friel around 1982: “His wife came in and said, ‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s terrible, it’s just like him’.”

This third volume of Movers and Shapers is weighed heavily towards Cork, where Ryan teaches at the Crawford College of Art and Design. Included are interviews with Geoff Steiner-Scott, the retired principal of the Crawford; Cormac Mehegan, the one-time chief designer with Youghal Carpets; Peter Murray, the director of the Crawford Art Gallery; and Robbie McDonald, the new director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the artists’ retreat at Annamakerrig in Co Monaghan.

McDonald was one of the founders of the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. His account of the arts scene in the city in the late 1970s is fascinating, and surely deserves a book of its own. He goes further back as well, recalling how the architect Robin Walker — husband of Dorothy, and a partner in Scott Tallon Walker — proposed that the new Opera House be built as one of a series of dedicated arts buildings on what was later the Jurys Hotel site on the Western Road. His suggestion that the new building should be an arts centre, and not just a home for opera — already in decline in the city — was met with indifference. “Give them what they want: A concrete block,” said his senior partner, Michael Scott. Which is, more or less, what they delivered.

The most recent interview in the book is with the art critic Aidan Dunne, which brings us up to early last year, acknowledging the influence of the new money of the boom years on the art market, and the decline in sales there has been since the bust.

Ryan’s style is to probe the background to each of her subjects’ involvement in art, as well as an overview of their activities. She goes on to elicit their opinions on the current players in the Irish arts world, and how that world is evolving.

The last 10 years have seen an explosion in activity in the visual arts in Ireland, and one must be grateful indeed for how vivid a sense of that dynamic Ryan has captured in Movers and Shapers I, II and III.

PICTURE THIS: Author Vera Ryan is a lecturer at CIT Crawford College Of Art And Design and has just published her third book of interviews with prominent people in the Irish arts world. Picture: Pascal Ungerer