Portrait of the Artist

As the black electric gates of Guggi’s period home in Dundrum clang loudly closed, it’s a relief to see that there’s no wolf slavering at his front door. I don’t mean that metaphorically.

The last time I called here, years back, there was an angrily white-fanged creature the size of a small horse chained outside. It looked like one of the baddies in a Jack London novel.
“Nah, the wolf’s long gone,” Guggi explains. “It was an alpha male wolf so it was always trying to establish dominance. We started having fights and he bit me a couple of times. Eventually I realised: the way an alpha wolf sees the world, it had to be him over me. They have to have total dominance. And he could’ve easily killed me.”
Guggi shares the house with his German wife Sybille, their four Biblically-named sons (Noah, Eliah, Caleb and Gideon), his eldest son Moses from a previous relationship, a few lizards and reptiles, and six relatively non-threatening dogs. Skinny, leathery and with trademark blonde hair hanging down, today Guggi seems a touch out of sorts. “Em… weren’t you supposed to be here at lunchtime, Olaf?” he asks, in his gravelly tone. I assure him that this is the agreed time. When we enter the kitchen, Sybille concurs: “I could have told you he was due at 2.30, Gugs, but I haven’t seen you yet today.”
He’s feeling slightly discombobulated following a late night. “I only drank a bottle of wine,” he sighs, kissing his wife hello. “Myself and my mate Reggie, we ate in Town Bar & Grill. And then Jim Sheridan and Fran came in and we just started meeting loads of people. And it ended up being a big posse. We wound up in the Baggot Hutton, this great little wine bar on South William St. I just had one bottle of cider there, so yeah. That’s all it takes nowadays. It hammers me.”
Coffee jugs and cups of tea in hand, we head out to his high-ceilinged studio and spark up cigarettes and the battered Superser. “Smoking isn’t just tolerated here,” he says, “it’s positively encouraged!”
He apologises for the tidiness of the place. “It’s because I’m doing interviews and photo sessions in the run-up to exhibition time that the studio is reasonably tidy. It’s not generally like this.”
The last time I visited, we talked about his membership of influential Dublin post-punk act The Virgin Prunes and his lifelong friendships with Gavin Friday and Bono (it was a young Paul Hewson who first dubbed him ‘Guggi’). He quit the band in 1984 to become a full-time painter and, today, he’s promoting his upcoming show of paintings, sculptures and digital prints at the Kerlin Gallery.
There are seven large painted bowls madhattering in the centre of the studio (which will carry price-tags in the €6,000 region) and a number of big oil on wood paintings leaning heavily against the wall. All that remains is for him to sign the pieces before they’re transported to the gallery...

OLAF TYARANSEN: This will be your first solo exhibition on home turf in a while.
GUGGI: Since I last showed with the Kerlin, I’ve shown in London, New York, Berlin, and then last year in Buenos Aires and Monaco. So I’ve done five shows in those four years.
Can painters make a decent living in Ireland?
I had a lot of lean years when I left the Prunes. But I believed in the decision I had made. It was always what I wanted to do, and it slowly started to build. I started to get a reputation of being a decent painter before the Celtic Tiger. And then the Celtic Tiger happened and it went from being a nice demand that kept getting bigger, to a crazy demand that I simply couldn’t cater for.
You changed your style at the height of all
of that.
I’ve changed many times over the years. I mean, I want to do the painting that I’m most excited about next. I’ve always been like that. But for a lot of years now I’ve used these common objects: text, bowls, certain numbers. I use certain colours that I feel incredibly strongly about – and that seem to in some way represent what I want to do. So these things are to me what language is to a poet. It’s not necessarily what the paintings are about. I’ve added to my vocabulary as time has gone on but what the paintings are about is how they affect people.
Do you get ever get so attached to a painting that you won’t sell it?
Never. There’s no work that I regret selling. There were paintings that I was incredibly proud of and that, to my mind, were truly great paintings. But I have always believed that the way you get better is never to get precious. I will let my best painting go with the genuine belief that I can
do better.
Do you ever have any doubts about your work?
I have huge self-confidence problems with many things, but painting has never been one of them. For many years, I had a real problem with shyness which I wouldn’t give in to, and I overcame it to a large extent. And I know that I’m crap at most things, but I always deep-down believed that I was potentially a great painter. I needed to believe that because you take a lot of knocks along the way.
What kind of knocks?
For many years I went further and further into debt, talking people into lending me money when they really were sick of seeing me walking through their door. Because I had a little kid, I was renting a house, and I was working at a loss. But what kept me going, and what made me want to get up in the morning, is deep-down I truly believed that I was a great painter.
Have you taken many critical knocks?
No. You read little things about you on a personal level that you need to get thick-skinned about. That kind of thing I don’t mind anymore. Looking to borrow cash off people and not really knowing when I could pay them back – that was hard, because I’m not good at hitting people for cash. They’ve all been paid back, thankfully, but that I found very tough. You feel like an asshole, you feel like a sponge.
You mentioned shyness, but your core group of friends are serious extroverts.
Look, I’ve always been very introverted and very extroverted at the same time. I don’t think I’m shy anymore. If you know you’ve got to perform then you’re not shy. But Gav would be no different to me. Gavin Friday was a lot shyer than I was. He’s the shyest person I ever met. And he’s also such
an extrovert.
Is your faith still important to you?
Hugely. I mean it’s a part of me. I can’t imagine that it will ever not be a part of me.
You were brought up in a strict fundamentalist household.
A lot of what my dad would’ve taught me in terms of teaching by example, I would’ve completely dismissed. So, my faith is a personal faith, nothing to do with my childhood. I believed when I was a kid, but no, it’s a personal thing.
Your father used to give you and your brothers pudding bowl haircuts as children. Is that where the bowl motif comes from?
That’s something that Bono said years ago actually. He seems to find it funny. But, you know, why does anybody do anything? We have subconscious reasons, so if somebody comes along and says that… (shrugs). It’s not like he actually put a bowl on my head. He was just crap at cutting hair! And it ended up looking like a bit of a bowl, around the time when bowls were very uncool (smiles). And I hated those haircuts. But it’s just a shape that fascinates me. The bowl seems to me to be the ultimate three-dimensional shape. I think it is incredibly symbolic.
Of what?
It goes back to how I was brought up, in a strict fundamentalist church. It can represent poverty and begging. It can represent wealth. It can be half-full or half-empty. I don’t think that it came from the bowl haircut, but how can one say?
You’ve used a lot of Russian text in these
new paintings.
I find Russian text visually incredibly powerful. It’s to do with when we were brought to church as children – and we used to get brought an awful lot – and they used to get northern Presbyterians up to scream at us. Quite scary actually. Screaming “You will burn in hell if you haven’t found Jesus!” They used to talk about the missionaries that would go out trying to smuggle bibles in behind the Iron Curtain. And then you’d see, when we were a little bit older, on an old black and white television, little bits of secret footage taken in the USSR and you’d sometimes see this bold lettering over buildings, little bits of text. I found it incredibly scary, but I also found it very powerful aesthetically. Understanding what it was saying was not at all important to me: it just meant something to me. So I became interested in using it.
Do you have a regular work routine?
By nature, I’m lazy. And if you’re a painter you can’t be that, you’ve got to get decent days in. I get up at about 10.30 or 11 o’clock. I do my sit-ups and press-ups, which I’ve done since I was a kid every day. I’m not really a keep-fit kind of guy. It takes me five minutes. It’s not a big work out. I go for a fast walk. I have my pot of green tea and some breakfast and walk back to the studio. I usually start at any time between midday and 1pm, and I finish between midnight and 1am. It’s a long day, but I stop for lunch and dinner.
Do you plan out your shows in advance or just randomly work on things?
It’s a bit of both. It’s an enormous relief when the work is no longer in my hands. It’s like this huge weight has been lifted. And then you walk into an empty studio. In my early exhibitions, that used to make me sad. Now it makes me very happy. When you start to look at white walls, and you start thinking, and you have ideas already that have come, and have lingered – then you start getting excited about your next painting.
What’s been the proudest moment of your life?
I suppose there’s different kinds of proud. As each of my children were born, that was huge. I have five boys. Every single one of those occasions was just beyond massive. I don’t know if ‘proud’ is the word. My heart just melts when this tiny little thing that has got to fight so hard to get into the world appears: holding them is something that has deeply affected me every time. The proudest? I can be absolutely honest and tell you – the proudest moments that come to mind, are being at the mixing desk, when U2 play one of their great gigs. That makes me very proud of my childhood friend and proud of the band.
Have you heard much of the new album?
I’ve probably heard most of it. I’m not good at remembering titles, but I have certainly heard some songs that are right up there, without a shadow of a doubt.
Were you personally affected by the recession?
I think everybody was. It was a feast followed by a famine. But you know what? I’m bored of the recession. Bored talking about it, bored complaining, and bored listening to people complaining! I just find it painfully boring. The last half of last year was good for me – probably because I wasn’t showing in this country. I sowed seeds in other places, when people were just selling here. But I think Ireland is bored of the recession. I think that’s the first step for actually moving on. Making it history.
Do you listen to music while you work?
Yeah. I hope you don’t go through my CDs because a lot of them are actually probably shite (laughs). People give me CDs. I always say I’ll give them a spin and I always mean to. I like stuff that’s down. I don’t like loud stuff. I could listen to rock ‘n’ roll in the car, but I like Dylan, Cohen, sometimes Van Morrison, sometimes Johnny Cash. I seem to like Marvin Gaye lately in the studio. Even though Simon [Carmody] slags me for it, I listen to a bit of Nick Cave. I listen to some classical music, too.
I always know I’m working well when I’ve totally failed to realise that the music’s stopped.
Yeah! That happens to me all the time. It used to happen to me. This thing starts buzzing now (points at paint splattered speaker). I think one of my speakers is on the way out...
What’s your take on the art world generally?
I don’t know. When I see people like Damien Hirst, who I believe is the wealthiest artist in history, I can appreciate and admire some of the stuff he does. I don’t get all of it. Some of it doesn’t really speak to me. But I don’t claim to have any expertise. I’m just an old fashioned painter. Well, I’m a modern painter, but I’m a painter. What he’s doing is different.
Have you ever studied art?
I’ve studied art all my life by myself, but I’ve never studied under anybody. In secondary school, I got incredible encouragement from my teacher Jimmy Burns. He separated me from the rest of the class, put me in the stock room, and got me anything that I ever asked for. That encouragement meant so much to me because I had been convinced by teachers and, you know, aunties, uncles and neighbours, that I couldn’t be a painter, that I should try and get into the civil service or take a trade or get a steady job. “No, you can’t be an artist, don’t be ridiculous!”
Did you resent that?
We came from a street in old Ballymun and it would have been a pretty humble situation, and our dad probably felt very lucky to have a job. At one point, soon after I left the Prunes, I did start entertaining the idea that they might be right. But that didn’t last.
Bono and Gavin aside, do you socialise with other artists much?
Both Bono and Gav paint. I can tell you Bono painted before he sang. He might have hummed to himself in secret, but myself and Bono, when we were little boys, we painted together a huge amount. We had a little place that was cleared out in his garage where we would paint. His dad, who was a painter, would come out and critique us. So both of those guys paint, and both of them would be very opinionated when it comes to art. So they are my artist friends.
Are you friendly with any professional painters?
I’m friends with Phelim Egan. I’m friends with Sean Scully. Other artists like Brian McGuire, I’m very fond of. Robert Ballagh. Although I wouldn’t know the last couple of guys well. Do I socialise with them? Not as much as I’d like to. I love hanging out with Sean Scully. I love listening to him talk about his work. I like the way he sees things. I think I’ve learnt from him.
What’s your most treasured possession?
Gosh. I don’t really rate possessions. Weirdly, if I come across a little… (starts searching pockets). I probably can’t find one now, but I love little disposable lighters. If I’ve got a little disposable lighter, and it’s tiny and it fits in my pocket and it works really well, it’s probably my most prized possession because I get really upset if I lose it. People think that I’m not quite right (smiles). Gosh, there must be something else. Is a studio a possession? I suppose a studio is a possession. I mean, I don’t know what I would do without this.

Guggi is showing at Kerlin Gallery on Anne’s Lane, Dublin, until February 23. kerlin.ie