Great work tends to announce itself even without the benefit of hype. Many moons ago, when Paul Finucane was involved in setting up the medical school at the University of Limerick, in 2007, he and his colleagues decided to establish a collection of medicine-related art for the benefit of students at the college.
“I came across a painting called Embryo with Gas Mask at an auction house,” Finucane says. A provocative piece, the work had been used, with its artist’s permission, on an anti-nuclear-power poster in the 1970s. “It’s the notion of an embryo needing to be protected from the environment by having a gas mask,” Finucane says. “While it’s a challenging image, there’s no question about the quality of the draughtsmanship.”
Its creator’s name was Donal O’Sullivan. Finucane, a keen collector as well as founding dean of the school of medicine, embarked on a little detective work to learn more about him. This obscure artist, he discovered, had been prolific in the 1970s and 1980s. Based in Dublin, he had gone against the expressionism that was fashionable in Irish art circles at the time, trading instead in powerful, elegant and melancholy figurative art that often discomfited its viewers.
A prize winner and college activist, O’Sullivan had been a mover and shaker in his early life; at one point he appeared in the front row of the audience of The Late Late Show to protest against inadequate facilities at the National College of Art, resulting in important reforms. Then mental-health frailties set in. O’Sullivan died by suicide in 1991, aged just 46. In subsequent decades, he was largely forgotten by the art world, his work left to gather dust. It was, Finucane says, an unfortunate lack of recognition.
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That oversight is being addressed in a handsome book about O’Sullivan’s life and work, which gathers together his creations with reminiscences from Robert Ballagh, Vincent Browne, Annie West, Una Sealy and Cóilín Murray, among other well-known names, along with deeply felt reflections from family and other friends.
Finucane and Brendan Lyons of Red Barn Publishing, in west Co Cork, who suggested the book to mark what would have been O’Sullivan’s 80th birthday this year, hope to establish him as an important artist. “We tend to gravitate to stories around people who have not received the attention they deserve,” Finucane says. “Donal was someone who was able to argue for a cause but unable to do the same for his own work and career,” Lyons says. “He was a conundrum.”
Ballagh, who wrote the foreword to the book, knew O’Sullivan as a young man – he had been friends with his brother – and appreciated his hard-won skill as a figurative artist. “My studio is in Stoneybatter, and opposite where I am there’s a rather large house which he had a flat in,” Ballagh says.
“I used to bump into him. To develop the kind of skills that Donal had takes years and years of endeavour and commitment. Anyone who had an interesting face interested Donal. He was fascinated with Samuel Beckett’s face, with Alberto Giacometti’s face.”
Born in 1945 in Dublin, O’Sullivan was, Ballagh says, a shy man who was “also quite convinced of what he was doing”. When he was growing up, his parents, Mary and Patrick, ran a grocery in Ranelagh called Lily’s Dairy. Donal was the fifth of six children, a dreamy character who loved playing with his toy soldiers and drawing constantly, taking the greaseproof paper that separated the layers of Coconut Cream biscuits and working faces into the stains left on the paper.
“He enjoyed a bit of craic – as family we’d all have a loud laugh, and we’d sit together and the craic would bounce back and forth – but he was anxious nearly all of the time,” says his sister Marie O’Sullivan, a fellow artist, who also contributes to the book. “Even to go out the door it took effort.”
After studying architecture for a year at Bolton Street College of Technology, in an effort to do something sensible, O’Sullivan switched to the National College of Art, then based on Kildare Street. It wasn’t long before his talents were noticed. He won the Taylor Prize twice, in 1967 and 1968, while at the college. Gerald Davis, of the Davis Gallery on Capel Street, offered him an exhibition while he was still a student, and Suzanne MacDougald showed his work at her Lad Lane Gallery.
A distinctive presence dressed in black, with a helmet of hair and a Crombie coat, O’Sullivan had a painstaking working method that relied on sometimes frowned-upon techniques. He drew from images ripped from newspapers – a practice forbidden at art college – and would etch on bread paper, the thin tissue used to wrap loaves.
He wasn’t a natural agitator, but he’d had the benefit of a good education as a student at Blackrock College, in South Dublin, and was dismayed by the deficiencies he found at the National College of Art, which was using outmoded methods of teaching, and in any case had inadequate premises. After months of peaceful protest, O’Sullivan, a charismatic spokesman for the student body, decided enough was enough. The students staged a sleep-in from April 22nd until May 28th, 1969.
“If you want to protest about a situation, after everything else has failed, you just bring it to a halt, you have a work-in. If you want to stop something happening in a college, you occupy it,” he told The Irish Times on June 19th that year.
The protests succeeded. In 1971 the college moved to its current location, on Thomas Street in the Liberties. “He’d be shy and anxious and on edge,” Marie O’Sullivan says of her brother. “But he wouldn’t let that stop him protesting. He would force himself to go in and talk to Brian Lenihan” – minister for education at the time – “and be that public if he felt strongly about something”.
Donal’s work was very lyrical, romantic, meticulously drawn, at a time when people were painting brutal commentaries
— Una Sealy, artist
After graduating with an honours diploma, O’Sullivan set himself up in a chaotic studio in an old henhouse in the garden of his family home, on the corner of Ranelagh Road and Sallymount Avenue. A few chickens that remained would cluck over the work he discarded, leaving deposits to which he paid little heed.
The hens weren’t his only challenge. The climate at the time was harsh on artists. O’Sullivan was prolific: his studio was crammed with discarded drawings in charcoal and pencil, some of famous names, such as Sinéad O’Connor. Over his lifetime he would make thousands of artworks. But they didn’t seem to offer a vital critique of Ireland in the manner of work by other artists of the day, and he struggled to promote himself, failing to turn up even to his own exhibition launches. He found his main employment as a teacher at Dún Laoghaire School of Art and Design.
“Dublin was a grim city,” says Una Sealy, an artist and former student of O’Sullivan’s. “A lot of it was falling down. A lot of the Georgian buildings were either being demolished or held up with girders. There was massive unemployment. Donal’s work was very lyrical, romantic, meticulously drawn, at a time when people were painting brutal commentaries.”
Figures such as Patrick Graham and Brian Maguire drove a particular creative vision. “They would have been the artists that people looked up to in the late 1970s and 1980s. Donal’s work was of a high standard, and it has held that quality. But there was a couple of decades when that would not have been in fashion.”
Persuading people to buy art was itself quite a feat. “I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s,” Paul Finucane says, “and about the only thing you’d ever see in somebody’s house was a Sacred Heart lamp and a photograph of the pope and maybe John F Kennedy. To have any kind of original art would have been considered a gross waste of money.”
A notice from the Evening Press in 1981 carps that O’Sullivan is “too shy to attend his own exhibition but has no handicap when it comes to putting a price on the tag. It’s a pity, really, that people of undoubted talent gain their exclusivity by putting their work out of reach of the many who have vacant places on their walls.”
Then there was the melancholy aspect to his work that sometimes put people off. “There’s a sadness to his work,” his sister says. “That’s what hits people. People see a kind of darkness. If I was to show his work to someone who has never seen it before, they would nearly always come back and say there’s a darkness or sadness to it.”
At certain times in his life O’Sullivan was on medication for anxiety and depression. He became a heavy drinker. He had lengthy stays in hospital, where he seemed to have undergone electroconvulsive therapy: a handwritten poem reflects on the experience.
There is great pain in Marie O’Sullivan’s voice when she talks about those periods. A section of the book is devoted to recollections of the Ana Liffey Drug Project, the addiction-aid service where O’Sullivan gave some art-therapy and counselling time. “It was amazing for him to put himself forward to try and help while he was still struggling,” she says. “He was involved in so many things.”
By the time the artist died, in 1991, he had fallen out of touch with many of his old friends. When Brendan Lyons began tracking them down, many were delighted to have the opportunity to talk about O’Sullivan and his effect on them.
At the book’s recent launch at Cnoc Buí Arts Centre, in Union Hall in west Cork, where Mel Mercier performed an original composition set to O’Sullivan’s poetry, several contributors spoke about their relationship with O’Sullivan, reflecting on his many gifts as a listener, encourager and friend. “I learned so much from him,” Joan Cronin, his former girlfriend, said. “He was generous with his knowledge. I enjoyed the arts, but he gave me the confidence to be critically thinking about it.”
For Marie O’Sullivan, who has spent years seeking to re-energise interest in her brother’s art, the attention has been hugely gratifying. “There were so many stories. At the launch, things came up that I didn’t realise. Each person had their own little story of the time they spent with him. I didn’t actually break down – I was afraid I would – but I was very close to tears.”
The contributors hope that the book will go some way towards restoring O’Sullivan to his rightful place in Irish art and that curators might pay more attention to his work. “I’d be much more interested in some of the institutions taking an interest in him than the auction houses,” Ballagh says.
For Sealy, it’s important that a younger generation of artists become acquainted with him. “Younger artists won’t know who he is,” she says. “He was a very important part of Irish art. What he has done has contributed to what people are doing now. It’s important that this record of his life has been compiled by Brendan and Paul. It’s cementing his legacy.”
In a life cut short, the work still speaks, even now. “I’m optimistic,” Marie O’Sullivan says of the future. “Very optimistic.”
Donal O’Sullivan: An Artist Remembered, by Paul Finucane and Brendan Lyons, is published by Red Barn; it is available from cnocbuiarts.ie/publications and selected bookshops
