Artist Michael Mulcahy: ‘Nobody went near me because I lived in a hearse’

At the sight of his nearly naked, blue body, they disappeared into their huts. He walked to the centre of the village – “and trusting art as a common denominator of all cultures” – began to draw on the ground with a stick.

Curious eyes began watching him through the openings for windows. Eventually, they came out of their huts to see what he was doing. Later, the chief of the tribe came back from hunting for the day to find this stranger from Ireland in the middle of his people.

It was harvest moon festival time and he was allowed to stay for the rituals that night. Sitting with the chief, a plate of food was placed in front of Mulcahy.

“It looked like a stew,” he remembers. “The meat was soft and tasted like the fat of lamb. Historically, human brain was eaten by the tribe during rituals to absorb the intelligence of their enemies.”

At first light, he rowed back up the Sepik and somehow found his way on to the biggest river on the island.

His navigational skills deserted him in the wilds of Co Wexford last week. He wanted to show me a haunted field. Vera Whelan, his partner of 12 years, was driving the car. Sitting in the back, Mulcahy was giving directions until he saw a sign for a nursing home and realised we’d taken a wrong turn.

“Holy f**k!” he shouted, thus beginning a theatrical and indelicate performance at 70kmh on a rutted, country road. “You’re taking me to an old folks’ home!”

Turning 70 at the end of the month, Mulcahy won’t be retiring to an assisted living facility. He has a major exhibition at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin opening on July 15, followed by another expo in Australia next year.

Born on July 26, 1952, in York Street in Cork, he was the son of a wealthy draper in Dungarvan. He went to Clongowes College in Co Kildare as a boarder.

On June 5, 1966, he was tapped on the shoulder by a teacher during exams and told his mother, Ellis McSweeney, was seriously ill. He went to see her in hospital and the following day the 42-year-old died of a brain haemorrhage. Thirteen years of age, he was with her until the last moment.

“Witnessing that gasping for breath, you know it’s the last breath,” he says. “Then peace.”

His art teacher in Clongowes, Paul Funge, took him under his wing. “He cared for me. I am dyslexic. Paul knew dyslexics to be highly creative and allowed me into the art room any time. There he nurtured my creativity.” His father Bernie took Michael and his two brothers, Frank and the eldest, John, to Paris. They went to the Musée d’Orsay to see an exhibition by Max Ernst, the Surrealist painter. “I was fascinated by the dream-like imagery.”

He studied at the Crawford School of Art in Cork in 1969. A year later, he studied fine art at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

“We were revolutionary, and it was student riot time. We threw Classical statues down the stairs in protest. Expressionism was in all across Europe and we wanted the freedom of expression in our artwork. I didn’t despise college at all. It was just that at 20 the pull within me to travel was stronger.”

And so it proved. He dropped out of art college and wandered through Marrakesh, across the Sahara and then through Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia – wearing a jellaba, the one-piece hooded garment worn by the nomadic desert people – and painting murals as he went “for food and a few bob”.

“I f**ked off because it was in my DNA. My mother came from a hardcore IRA family in Mallow. When she was 14, she said ‘I’ve had enough of this small-town mentality, Catholic country going absolutely nowhere’. So she f**ked off to London where she got a job as a cook with the British navy in the Outer Hebrides at the end of World War II.”

He says Africa was a godsend for him. “It opened me up to the essence of things.” Maybe too much, in hindsight. He ended up in London, where he lived rough and ate out of restaurant rubbish bins. He bought a hearse from a car salesman in the East End for £500. “It was in good nick.” He lived in it for six months, parked in Camden. “Nobody went near me because I lived in a hearse.”

What brought him, psychologically as well as physically, to living in an undertaker’s car and eating from bins was, he says: “I suddenly felt the harshness of the opulence of the west, after two years of seeing such poverty in Africa.” He was eventually committed to a mental hospital for a time before he managed to get enough money to fly back to Dublin.

He drank until he fell down on the street. He was frequently arrested for drunken street performances that included masturbating fish on Grafton Street.

He was committed to St Pat’s mental health unit where he was, he claims, given electric shock treatment against his will, strapped to a steel table. “It was f**king horrendous,” he says. He had numerous sessions with psychologists. “They all told me I was sane.”

Once released, he flew to Düsseldorf where he lived and performed on the streets, usually 40 sheets to the wind – and naked. (An official biography in an old exhibition pamphlet says: “1978 Street performance, Düsseldorf.” That doesn’t quite tell the full story). He was eventually arrested and committed to a mental hospital.

The conclusion the psychologists reached in Germany was the same as in Ireland the previous year. He was sane. He returned to Ireland and lived with his father in the family home in Helvic, Co Waterford, and started to paint. “I had to work the abuse of the nuthouses out of my system,” he says.

How did he do that? “St Pat’s and the ECT [electroconvulsive therapy] against my will took a long time,” he says. “I painted and painted it out of my system. Doing many art works of heads and self portraits, I gained a deep respect, and didn’t take for granted the preciousness of our thinking processes. Düsseldorf psychiatric care was far more advanced than here. There I was counselled by an enlightened psychiatrist.

“To this day, I practice his advice. ‘Michael, there is nothing wrong with you. All it is, is that you have a tremendous amount of energy. You need to focus and channel this into your art, to stay in balance.’”

He had his first exhibition in 1981, with the help of his former art teacher Funge, who set up the first arts centre in Gorey. He stopped drinking. He joined Aosdána, he says, “to floods of relief, my back wasn’t to the wall financially anymore”. He will be “forever grateful to Charlie Haughey and the Arts Council for honouring us members who dedicate our life to art”.

In 1987, Haughey, then Taoiseach, came to the opening of his Sea and Sky exhibition, in the Taylor Galleries. “He bought two big paintings and got his office interior decorated to match the paintings. The only thing I recall him saying to me, is: ‘We both love the sea and art.’ I had a great appreciation for the man. He set up an annual income, gave credibility and honoured the hard work of artists like me.”

Within three years Mulcahy’s name had grown internationally. He had solo exhibitions in Australia and in 1988 an exhibition at Le Grand Marché in Timbuktu in Mali.

On March 23, 1989, his father died in hospital of third-degree burns after a fall by the fireplace at home in Co Waterford. He held his hand as he died. Two years later, he was living in South Korea for a year as a student to a Buddhist monk, Suan Sunim. In 1993 he was back in Ireland, living in Galway where he connected with Michael D Higgins, who was then Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.

“I met him in the art scene in Galway,” he says. “We’d a meeting of minds, in our appreciation of art. He loved my work and asked me to illustrate two of his poetry books. We became good friends, lifelong friends. We still keep in touch and meet from time to time. “

Around that period, he had a Brehon Law wedding to Biddy Mulcahy on a boat in Helvic. “I jumped naked off the boat. Michael was my guest.”

The clue is the word ‘naked’. His decade-long sobriety came to a crashing halt – and the legend of “Mad Mick” was born. Seemingly permanently inebriated, he could be relied upon to do bonkers things in public, among them walking down a street in Kerry in a ladies’ pink swimsuit.

“It was a very hot sunny day and I was on an artist retreat in the Cill Rialaig Arts Centre in Ballinskelligs. I was a bit of an exhibitionist back then, with a few beers in me. I thought nothing of putting on a pink swimsuit and walking through Cahersiveen. Everyone knew me there as a bit of a character anyway – and, sure, what else could you do, on a scorching hot day, when young and foolish?

“Same with me taking a string of plastic ducks on a walk beside me through St Stephen’s Green. A bit of performance art. People said I had a childlike innocence of enjoying myself. I loved doing that kind of non-threatening tomfoolery when I’d a few beers in me. It’s the craic of the Irish, isn’t that what they say? I wonder did we lose that and become a more serious people?”

What doesn’t he like about Ireland now?

“I don’t like all the political correctness. Nobody can say anything anymore, for fear of offending someone. Or the cloning of students to be slaves for the corporate world. That’s minor, though, compared to the better changes.

“Ireland was poverty-ridden in the 1950s, when I was growing up. So we’ve progressed economically for the better. The release from the draconian hold of the Catholic Church too, has been a great revolution to individual choice. All this is Ireland and the Irish maturing. So I’m hopeful for modern Ireland.”

In the mid-1990s, he was living, working and exhibiting in Paris, where he met Adriana, a Romanian artist. In March 17 of 1999 their daughter Fiona was born, who he clearly adores and visits regularly in France. He laughs and says he gritted his teeth when Fiona did three years studying law. Much to daddy’s delight, she “felt it wasn’t for her” and is now putting a portfolio together, to get into art college.

On March 27, 2004, his younger brother Frank died by suicide. “Frank was a gentle soul, too much so for the tougher side of this world,” says Mulcahy. “It was financial stress that depressed him in the end, I think, in hindsight. Who knows, though? Nobody really knows why someone takes their own life but themselves. It’s sad.”

Later, Vera says something revealing. In 2011 – a year before they became romantically involved – at an exhibition of Mulcahy’s in The Pigyard Gallery in Wexford, she was sitting outside on the windowsill of the gallery, giving out to a friend about her disappointment of Mulcahy’s beautiful colours having disappeared from his work.

“Turns out he was sitting behind me, and heard,” she recalls. “He was brave. He moved over to me, and struck up a conversation about art. I found out after that his brother had died by suicide years previous and it had impacted him greatly.”

How does he process his pain?

“I wouldn’t say Michael gets stuck in, or buries grief,” she says, at their house in Wexford. “He works his way through it. All the colour was back in his paintings a few years later, the grief gone.”

As for his work now, she says he has a “colourful spirit, that quickly, and sometimes ferociously, draws and paints negative emotions out of him... in dark colours, just so the stunningly extraordinary beautiful colours can prevail before him again.”

She laughs at the public perception of him as this madman who paints. “I didn’t know him 40 years ago. He was never mad, mentally ill or insane. Back then, if you stood out from the repressed crowd in any way at all, you were considered mad.”

She teaches yoga in Wexford. “I live in the ‘now’,” she says. “And in the ‘now’ I see when Michael’s upset that he drinks as a catharsis to release and let go. So he can be free to paint again.”

Three days later in his studio he discusses his art. He says his best work was during the period 1981 to 1993 when he was sober. “I built my reputation as an artist, by nonstop working during those 12 years off alcohol. My diligence was the best then, as I wanted to see if I could make it as an artist.

“As to whether the paintings themselves were better, that’s down to individual taste. The paintings then were more contained, of darker colours and of classical brushwork. As I became less fearful of not making it as an artist, my work became more colourful happy and full of character.

“Every painting leads up to the next painting, so it’s all a development. Some much prefer my work from then, some love the work I do now more.”

Why doesn’t he become sober again now to paint?

“I came off the drink again, between 2002 and 2007 and I found I couldn’t paint at all. So it’s not true that sobriety makes me paint better. Sipping a couple of beers can turn out as good a painting as when sober. Being drunk, as in not just painting, turns everything to chaos.”

As to what inspires his work now, he says: “Everything that emotionally impacts me in a strong way.” He’s working on a huge painting, 8ft tall x 12ft, of the Ukrainian war.

“It’s terrible what’s happening there,” he says. “I’ve done a series of paintings on the Covid crisis. I always come back to painting the sea though. The sea has been a constant inspiration to me for 50 years. Many of my paintings in the exhibition at Taylor Galleries are of currach boats on the sea in the Aran Islands.”

He describes his art “as expressionist – where emotions, imagery and mood are conveyed through varying use of brushstroke and colour. Most say they find my colours very uplifting, and that my paintings make them happy.”

And is he?

“I am happy,” he says. “Vera makes me happy. Our four dogs make me happy,” he adds, referring to Molly, a border collie, Suzy, a springer spaniel, and Charlie and Nelly, twin brother and sister of a cross between a collie and springer. All of whom bark at the door of the studio to be let in.

“I’m happy sailing. I’m delighted that painting still excites me. I think I’m just getting into my stride. ‘Painting is an older man’s game’, as Picasso used to say. I’m happier with the body of work I have going into the exhibitions these days than I have ever been.”

He does seem less dotty than he used to. Mulcahy still isn’t frightened of what people will think of him – he has always spoken his mind even when it would be best not to. Still, he doesn’t talk manically anymore about how “suicide is the new Famine in Ireland” or how he would like to see the bankers during the recession in this country “flogged and castrated”.

“I don’t really think of those things these days,” he says. “In my delight of being out sailing again I’m happy to leave grief behind, dream and think of the sea.”

Does he ever have nightmares about his ECT treatment or his brother’s tragic death?

“No, I never have nightmares of ECT or dream of Frank. I don’t believe in a god, heaven or hell. I believe in an all-loving sea of consciousness that we go back into when we die.”

In his seventh decade, he doesn’t think of his own death either. “No, I’m too busy living and enjoying my life. I hope the transition from this life into the eternal adventure just takes me by surprise some day.”

‘Mulcahy at 70’ exhibition runs at Taylor Galleries, Dublin, from July 15 until August 5