INTERVIEW:Gearóid Hayes' portraits appear to have been plucked from the past, yet their contemporary subjects lend an unsettling immediacy. It's just one of the paradoxes that unfurl around this artist, write GEMMA TIPTON.
UNSETTLINGLY TIMELESS faces look back at you from the canvasses in Gearóid Hayes’s studio. It’s a bright, sunny, winter day in Dublin, but in the studio, up several flights of stairs in a Georgian building near St Stephen’s Green, it’s rather darker.
The window is curtained off with a heavy black drape, leaving light to come in from a section at the top – it’s easier to control that way. One of the walls, too, is draped in black, and so the focus of the room is on an easel and a small platform, which stand at the centre. And on all those faces . . .
The faces are unsettling because it feels as if they have appeared in this studio, amid the tubes of paint, the palette and the brushes, transported from a different time and place: from the 17th century, perhaps, and from the Uffizi in Florence or the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. And yet, at the same time, these are the faces of contemporary people, dressed in modern clothes. The large portrait in oil of a dark woman, arms folded, and eyes looking out at you, is of a girl Hayes met at Ely Wine Bar. A pencil sketch of a man’s face bears a strong resemblance to Irish rugby international Gordon D’Arcy, which turns out to be exactly who it is – D’Arcy being one of Hayes’ best friends since their school days.
Hayes isn't really what you'd expect of an artist who paints in this manner. Meeting him, in the cafe of the Royal Hibernian Academy, en route to his studio, lines from one of Thomas Kinsella's poems came unbidden to my mind: I wonder whether one expects / Flowing tie or expert sex . . . / of poets any longer.
I wasn’t expecting a tie, and neither was I planning to find out about the latter, but the surprise was a man in his 20s, in a black T-shirt, wearing a feather earring, and apologising for the hoarseness of his voice – he had been shouting too loudly, cheering Ireland’s rugby team to victory over France a couple of nights before.
It may be the case that all our preconceptions and prejudices are there to be broken, but with Hayes the unexpected continues to an extraordinary degree. This painter of astonishingly accurate and technically excellent classical portraits went to Clongowes Wood College and then studied business and law at UCD. Is Clongowes famed for turning out artists, I want to know? Not necessarily, Hayes replies, “though one thing the Jesuits do is teach you how to think, they get you questioning things”. His UCD studies were at the behest of his father (Hayes is the eldest of three), who wanted him to at least get a decent degree before he went off into the world.
Following this, he tells me, he spent a year “travelling Europe on my own, looking at art, and trying to decide whether to become an abstract artist or a classical painter”, although I suspect he also made time for other pursuits. He had his epiphany moment in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
“I’d spent about six hours in the Stedelijk, between a Mondrian and a Malevich, and these were the paintings that I was meant to get excited about, but they felt flat to me, I almost felt robbed. And then I went to the Rijksmuseum and saw the Rembrandts, and even though I had seen them in books, they looked as if they could have been painted yesterday. They were the ones I had an emotional reaction to, they blew me away.”
The suggestion of a family friend sent him to Florence, to take a summer art course at the Palazzo Pitti, but he immediately felt held back and constrained by the level of teaching. “They had us drawing scale boxes,” he remembers. “I couldn’t believe it.” Something came out of it, however, for the course teacher recommended he try the atelier of Charles Cecil.
Cecil is an American artist who came to Florence in 1978. His studio, in a converted church, the Chiesa di San Raffaello, is the oldest Florentine workshop/studio still in active use. Cecil specialises in teaching the sight-size technique, which is where the canvas is placed beside the model, so that the painting is seen at the same scale as what, or who, is being painted. The artist stands back to assess scale, and then moves forward to the canvas again.
Describing having her portrait made in this manner by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the 18th century, Lady Burlington noted that the artist “took quite a quantity of exercise when he painted”. She added, “his plan was to walk away several feet, then take a long look at me and the picture as we stood side by side, then rush up to the portrait and dash at it in a kind of fury. I sometimes thought he would make a mistake, and paint on me instead of the picture.” Cecil, who is revered by his students – Hayes calls him “the Maestro” – learned the technique from RH Ives Gammell who had learned it from John Singer Sargent and his contemporaries in the early part of the last century.
“It is far more important,” Gammell told Cecil, “that you teach this tradition than you become the greatest painter who ever lived, because if you don’t pass on the knowledge I’m giving you, it will die out.”
In addition to working on his technique as an artist, Hayes also took up rugby again, joining one of Florence’s four rugby clubs. It was a good way to learn the language, he says – though I imagine he acquired a fairly colourful version of Italian that way – as well as to become immersed in a different level of Florentine life than is found at an international art school. And then, after three years, he came home.
Painting with a master in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, where great works of art greet you on practically every corner, and where the barmen look like something out of a Leonardo da Vinci, and Botticelli’s women seem to work in the coffee shops, is one thing, but what was it like to return to Dublin to make a career as an artist here? The first thing Hayes found difficult was getting a studio – the Celtic Tiger was still going strong, and no one wanted to give a gorgeous Georgian room, full of the right sort of light, to a young artist, even if he did have the money to pay for it. A chance meeting in a bar found him a sublet, and now things have swung the other way – there are studios available, though fewer people to buy the work. That said, Hayes hasn’t experienced any difficulties yet. The gallery at Greenacres in Wexford has some of his work, and a painting hangs in Richard Corrigan’s restaurant, Bentley’s, on St Stephen’s Green.
Hayes paints portraits to commission, and of friends and people he meets whose faces intrigue him. He has had to give up rugby. Following a couple of injuries, Cecil reminded him that he wouldn’t be able to follow the sight-size technique if he couldn’t walk. So perhaps he does conform more to my preconceptions of what an artist should be than I had first imagined – giving up the thing he loves, for the sake of his work.
Gearóid Hayes can be contacted on 087-1302532, or by e-mail at gearoidhayes@yahoo.co.uk