'Jesus, did I paint them?’; Robert Ballagh reacts to the nude portraits to him and his wife
Robert Ballagh’s many connections with Cork go all the way back to his showband days, writes .
Robert Ballagh has been visiting with his paintings in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. Two of Ballagh’s intimate nude portraits of him and his wife, Betty, are included in the Naked Truth: Nudes in Irish Art, the gallery’s current exhibition.
‘Inside No 3’ depicts Betty descending a spiral staircase into the confines of their small living room, her face averted. ‘Upstairs No 3’ inverts the trope of the female nude with generosity and humour: Ballagh, clad only in a t-shirt and socks, ascends to his wife, waiting on the bed with a book of ancient Japanese erotica. The paintings are on loan from the Ulster Museum and a private collection.
“I haven’t seen them often at all in all these years, so I went in today and had a look at them and thought, ‘Jesus, did I paint them?’” Ballagh says, now ensconced in the Crawford’s café. He chuckles, recounting a tale from the first exhibition of the paintings in the Hendricks gallery in Dublin in the 1980s.
“I had a friend, a very flamboyant Dublin Jew who delighted in dressing up as Leopold Bloom every Bloomsday. At the opening, he looked at the paintings and came running over and embraced me and said, ‘Bobby! I never knew you were Jewish too!’”
Conversation with the painter is peppered with anecdotes: the time he was allowed to handle one of Joyce’s manuscripts, the sale of his Fender Bass guitar to a young Phil Lynott after he quit his band, a scandal over a kite in the shape of a flasher that he exhibited in Kilkenny.
Ballagh and his work have hovered close to the centre of Irish life for decades. As the designer of the last Irish punt banknotes, as well as many of our stamps, he’s an artist whose work was once seen daily, albeit unconsciously, by virtually everyone in the country. He designed the backdrops for one of Ireland’s most famous cultural exports, Riverdance. He even designed the masthead for this very newspaper.
Simultaneously, he’s managed to skirt full establishment acceptability with his tradesman-like approach to art: emerging as a pop artist following his time playing with popular showband The Chessmen, educated not in art college but as an architectural draughtsman, his rise to commercial success, he freely admits, is out of line with some thinking in the world of fine art.
“Some artists are very precious about not accepting commissions because they think they dilute your talent or something.” he says.
But before modern art, artists worked for Popes and princes and magnates: all artists did work they were paid to do. Somewhere along the line, people started believing that artists were prostituting themselves by working for capitalists, or the Church, or whatever
“I’ve found commissions can lead to some of the most exciting projects and places. Over the years, I’ve done loads of things that turned out to be really important for me that were commissions.”
More than a few of Ballagh’s tales involve Cork, where he has a holiday home in Ballycotton, and where his daughter, the artist Rachel Ballagh, lives. He held an exhibition in the Crawford to mark his 70th birthday and the county holds many memories for him, not least of wild nights in his youth when The Chessmen used to play The Arcadia dance hall.
Another anecdote: commissioned to paint Fastnet lighthouse for the Commissioners of Irish Lights, he recalls, he was flown by helicopter from Cork airport to photograph the West Cork landmark for his painting, his first ever helicopter ride.
Following the thrilling spin, Ballagh expected to be dropped at the airport but discovered his pilot had other plans and was Galway-bound. “But my car is in Cork,” he pleaded, upon which the helicopter pilot agreed to fly under the radar and make a highly irregular stop in a playing field on the outskirts of Schull.
“All the children from the school nearby ran out, shouting, ‘Who is it, who is it?’ I don’t know who they thought it was going to be, but when I took off the flight suit they said, ‘Who’s he?’ and went wandering back to school, bitterly disappointed.”
“I was very happy with the painting, with the lighthouse looking so lonely out in the Atlantic,” he concludes, “but I couldn’t resist painting in a little helicopter.”
For all his Cork connections, he’s still a straight-talking Dub through and through, and it’s a simplicity and directness that’s evident in his writing, for, at 75, he’s written an autobiography, A Reluctant Memoir.
The directness in his style makes his words all the more poignant when he writes of coming to terms with losing his wife, Betty, and the details of her shocking death in 2011, which gave rise to a medical negligence case in the High Court. She died of heart failure in a bathroom in St Joseph’s hospital, following a two-month delay in surgical treatment for diverticulitis.
“She was, in a way, my moral compass. I am adrift without her,” he writes in his memoir.
She was also his greatest art critic and grounding force; if Ballagh ever made a radio or television appearance, on returning home and asking her how it went, she’d say, “It wasn’t bad, but less of the ‘me’ business.”
So what would she make of the book? It’s a reluctant memoir in part, he writes, due to the spectre of this reticence she induced in his life. “She’d hate it,” he says. “She hated spoofers, and people boasting about their achievements. But so many people asked me to do it.”
Betty had battled with alcoholism following a brain injury, and this too is addressed with candour in the book. “I just decided there’s no point in writing it if I’m not going to be honest,” Ballagh says. “I had to talk about it with the kids and tell them that I’d have to deal with Betty dying, and her drinking problems. I didn’t want to write about it, but on the other hand it wouldn’t be honest not to. It’s an obligation, really, to be as truthful as you can be.”
It hasn’t been plain sailing for Ballagh in recent years, starting before Betty’s illness with his own health issues, firstly with chemotherapy to successfully treat chronic lympatic leukaemia (CLL) and then a diagnosis with type 2 diabetes.
He’s also relived the nightmare of losing his wife when his daughter Rachel was admitted to Cork University Hospital with the same condition and ended up battling for her life in intensive care following surgery.
“It’s still raw, because it was only two years ago,” he says. “She was booked in, and I returned to Dublin. Then my son called me and said I needed to come back to Cork. She was in a coma: they told us in the hospital to book into a hotel nearby because they weren’t sure if she was going to make the night.” He shudders at the memory, although she has made a full recovery since.
His most recent and growing collection of self-portraits, then, first exhibited as a collection entitled Ego, is his response to these brushes with death, his growing awareness of his mortality; he’s charting his own aging process, and he’s not planning on stopping until he has to.
“People asked me how I was going to end the book, and I told them I was going to die in the end; everybody does,” he says.
Spoiler alert: true to his word, Ballagh ends his book describing how he wants to go out, making his last self-portrait.
He’s hoping to be able to “make some rudimentary marks on a sheet of paper as that moment approaches; perhaps a faint, primordial swirl containing a frail scratch and two smudges, readable even to infants as a primitive face, indicating that this was an artist-once.”
