When life truly is colourful

Bill Griffin has hung out with Francis Bacon, and been given a watch by Gadaffi, but he is at his

happiest in his studio in Co Cork, writes Colette Sheridan.

Self-taught artist, BillGriffin’s early dabbling in art as a schoolboy earned him whacks across his hands when he was caught sketching nudes. A pupil at the North Monastery in Cork, he recalls “stupidly putting the drawings into the back of my English copy-book. The leather strap was part of the daily routine”.

Griffin, whose latest exhibition is currently showing in Cobh, recalls painful memories of school. “I was dyslexic. The teachers thought they could beat that out of you. They didn’t know what dyslexia was. They thought it was stupidity and that I was a bit slow. I knew I wasn’t the idiot they kept telling me I was.

“But if you’re told you’re an idiot, it doesn’t take long before you lose confidence.”

Originally from Barrett’s Terrace in Blarney Street, Cork, Griffin’s father worked as a dental mechanic. Griffin, who harboured ambitions to be an artist, left school at 14 and started working in an engineering business on North Main Street. After a few years there, he got a job in Fords car factory.

“It could have been a job for life but I got fired after 12 months, for incompetence,” he says.

Like many of his generation (Griffin was born in 1947), he moved to London when he was 19. The plan was to become an artist, armed with a letter of introduction to contacts at Chelsea Art College, written by the sculptor Seamus Murphy, a good friend of Griffin’s father.

Reflecting on that time, Griffin says he thought he was a man of the world. “But I was coming from Cork. So what do you expect? I was naive.”

It was the mid-1960s in London and the young Griffin discovered sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Was it exciting?

“It didn’t seem so at the time but looking back now, it definitely was. I started painting over there and I hung out with artists.”

Among these artists was Francis Bacon, whose advice to Griffin was to always get paid in guineas rather than pounds. Griffin went to dinner a few times with Bacon and his lover /muse, George Dyer, who took his own life in 1971, aged 37. Griffin became friendly with Dyer and witnessed firsthand Bacon’s appalling treatment of the handsome young man.

Griffin has written a one-man show about the relationship between Bacon and Dyer which will be performed in Cobh.

“Bacon was charming and generous to a fault when he was sober. But he was obnoxious when he was drunk and was extremely bitchy.

“Dyer wasn’t treated well by Bacon. He was Bacon’s model. He did about 20 portraits involving Dyer and this work was widely regarded as his best period. When he completed those paintings, Bacon didn’t really want any more to do with Dyer. Bacon still wanted him around but the intimacy was gone. He had been using the sexuality between them for his work.”

For Griffin, trying to make a living as an artist in London was difficult. “I used to take odd jobs now and then but nothing ever lasted more than a few weeks. I was in one exhibition but the gallery owner vanished with all the funds. That was really the end of it for me. I stayed for another year but being Irish in London at the time certainly didn’t help.”

Griffin met a man in the oil business and re-invented himself, this time as an oil rig contractor. The work was tough but he says he loved it. “It was the physicality of it and being out at sea.”

Along the way, however, he lost confidence in his art. “I no longer thought I had any talent. Art is all about confidence and being willing to take chances. I was a bit older, settling down with my then wife. We had three kids. Being an artist wasn’t possible.”

But in 1999, Griffin had what he calls “a moment of madness” when he decided to return to art. “It had been lurking there somewhere. I was also disillusioned with the oil business. I had spent a few years in and around Iraq and I saw the way the industry was treating the population. Some of them starved to death. A million Iraqis died from sanctions that we imposed.”

Among the more colourful anecdotes from Griffin’s career in oil involves Colonel Gaddafi giving him the gift of a Rolex watch in gratitude for Griffin organising, through his work contacts, cutting-edge Swiss medical care for the late Libyan leader’s nephew who had been in a car accident. But as Griffin later discovered when he got it valued at Keane’s Jewellers (with a view to a pension pot), the watch isn’t made of solid gold but rather a gold plate, albeit with small diamonds.

Griffin loves his base in Allihies in West Cork, Griffin has had about 40 exhibitions. His art career, second-time around, is a success story. He credits his partner, Deirdre O’Donovan, a school principal, with supporting him through the lean years of the recession.

Griffin’s work is bold and colourful, although he works in semi-darkness, saying that the images are all in his head. Much of his work, oil on canvas, is figurative. Even when he paints landscapes, a figure will sneak onto the painting.

He has been described as a religious painter and says that while he’s not religious, he likes telling stories on canvas that sometimes include bearded biblical-type figures. Using his fingers to paint, instead of a paintbrush, Griffin often works on up to 20 paintings at a time.

“At the moment, I’m doing a lot of painting on recycled material,” he says.

His portrait of the late Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, is still in his West Cork studio. While it was reported back in 2005 that Griffin was invited to Cuba to meet the revolutionary leader, that didn’t transpire. Griffin, who was commissioned to paint the portrait by the Thomas Francis Maher Society in Cork, and he says there are still plans to find a home for it in Ireland.

Bill Griffin’s exhibition runs atColiemore in Cobh until May 1.