Solitude and isolation; duality, risk-taking and the notion of a quest as both artistic and spiritual journey are themes which have dominated the work and life of artist Anne Madden. A flamboyant figure, she walks straight-shouldered into the upstairs gallery of Dublin's Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, where her new exhibition is currently hanging. Looking as eager as a schoolgirl, if slightly wary, her expression is, as always, a mixture of confidence, apprehension and humour. The dull, mid-afternoon light struggling wearily in through the windows is further dissipated by the richly oriental gold and red of several of the works. Gold is an exciting, new colour for her. "It creates a dual surface, interplaying with the colour areas while reflecting light - sometimes to a blazing extent, if more muted from other angles - while the colour areas tend to absorb it. It was an exciting discovery for me. When you walk past the paintings, they tend to change their aspect according to where the spectator is." A sense of movement exists within these Icarus paintings, as if Madden has achieved a floating surface.

A member of the gallery staff tells her the show is doing well, the crowds are pleased - "It's pleasing," he adds, with mock formality. She smiles and begins to play with the word. "Pleasing? Good - but not too pleasing I hope." This Trajectories exhibition focuses on two dramatic sequences of paintings. Odyssey and Icarus are culminations of major preoccupations. By drawing on these myths, she is working in both an allegorical and autobiographical context. "Both myths are part of our European culture. But these myths insinuated themselves into the painting. They were not deliberate, conscious choices." She agrees the sequences possess a strong narrative dimension: we follow the small boat on its hazardous journey: the full drama of the flight of Icarus as heroic, doomed artist figure is enacted through a series of daring rises and falls.

"I can see the narrative now, but it was only while I was painting that it became clear to me," she says. "The boat I see as perhaps myself, and maybe it is my odyssey." A long pause. "Perhaps the odyssey of my painting as well as a life one? Maybe I'm trying to conjugate the relationship between art and life - which are, of course, diametrically opposed to one another because art is artifice. I want to break down structures; reject absolutes. I think we delude ourselves with barricades of logic, ideology, politic. . . . I want to knock down these flimsy edifices which leave us with the big question, the unanswerable, what is The Thing?"

This idea of no absolutes, of there being no final answer or conclusion to anything, is central to one of her earlier sequences, the Openings series, which began in the mid1980s after the death of her brother, Jeremy. His death, she recalls, "left me doing nothing for a long time, I was frozen, in a dark room". Samuel Beckett wrote to her. "Don't be depressed," he urged. "It is it trying to be said." Was she going to "tackle her dark?" he asked at their next meeting. "I had this feeling this was at the heart of everything for Beckett," she says, "the necessity to tackle this dark: it was a vital confrontation."

Hands behind her back, she stands before the pictures, examining them as if seeking answers. What began as a small boat gradually appearing on the vast sea develops into a conscious odyssey. The painting dictates: it leads the tiny vessel through a variety of contrasting seas, situations, realities which include crossing the Meridian and the sailing into the darkness, in Shadowline. Ultimately, it ends in tragedy. As does the story of Icarus. "I see Icarus as an artist-figure, - reaching for the impossible, transgressing the structures, the laws. He is a rebel, a dissenter, a subversive firebrand. The question is, is he destroyed by the truth he is seeking, or is he destroyed by his pride. Or both?"

Wondering if these works have come from what she describes as "some unconscious impulse, as pretexts in an attempt to conjugate life and art", Madden speaks of the trajectories as temporal space: "We are tied to time and staked in space. This imposition of time by us, on us, gave us the concept of distance, both physical and psychological. Time creates the concept of from here to there, but also as distance between and from, the `other'." Madden's ability to articulate her responses to her work has tended to create an impression of her as a cerebral artist. "I'm not at all intellectual," she stresses. "Painting for me is not an intellectual exercise, it's an instinctive impulse with its roots in feeling and emotion. You only come to understand what it is - or at least, come to some understanding of it - afterwards." She says the dualism in these new paintings reflects "an attitude, not a system. It remains open, imperfect, surprising, even extravagant - and exerts its tension in maintaining a hiatus, a perpetual and perilous imbalance. It's the tightrope walk, the whole thing. This applies to all my work." Literary and artistic references populate her use of language which is graceful, vividly descriptive, elegant, often dramatic and almost aristocratic, while remaining shrewd and exact. She pounces on books, particularly Irish poetry.

Naturally an intellectually-confrontational individual ("I'm provocative," she says), Madden tempers her bluntness with humour. Long years in France, where she has lived and worked for almost 40 years, have left her with a distinctly French repertoire of gestures. But then, she has always been an outsider - denied, as she says, "a particular home". People either enjoy her or remain cautious, wary of her mercurial temperament, theatricality, imperious eloquence and flair for withering one liners.

On being told this, she looks shocked: "Me? Intimidating? But I find people terrifying." She laughs and then describes an episode arising from the eventual detection of a serious recent illness. Madden had returned to her home in France from a trip to London and Dublin. "I knew I was ill. But the doctor seemed to feel otherwise."

Blood tests were done. "She, the doctor, came racing to the house. `The results,' she shouted, `are catastrophic.' I think she was quite embarrassed - we had always got on very well before this - I was lying in bed, and I asked `Exactly what are you trying to tell me, Doctor? That I have five more minutes to live?' " She laughs at it, adding, "And then there was this absolutely terrifying, car-swerving drive to the hospital." More laughter: she loves to shock and knows how to tell a story. Married to Louis le Brocquy since 1958, Madden appears to have enjoyed a privileged life - international success as a serious artist, a good relationship with a fellow artist and, through socialising with poets and artists from all over the world, access to diversity and intellectual stimulation. But there has also been a lengthy litany of personal tragedies; deaths, accidents and illnesses.

"I have always been preoccupied by death. It has certainly influenced my life, but how much the shock of the sudden or violent deaths of three members of my family - and of another, my two-year-old brother, when I was seven - coupled with an incapacity to deal with loss has influenced my work, I don't know." She sees her Megalith series as "10 years of elegies. They reflect my own preoccupations with life and death". As well as these deaths, Madden injured her spine in a riding accident at 18 and had to deal with the probability of never being able to walk again. "I do feel I've come through a lot, I see all these losses as amputations. I'm happy for the moment if we are left in peace without being clobbered by some new disaster."

The daughter of an Irish father and Anglo-Chilean mother, Anne Madden was born in London in 1932, "because my mother had this mad notion that she simply had to have her babies in London. So she raced away to England, leaving my sister behind in Chile". As a baby, she was brought home to South America and spent her first four years there. "I remember driving around in a cart or wagon, in a scorched, stubbly field. My sister was urging the oxen to gallop. She would have been five at the time. I was, what? Two or three?" Characteristic of the period, it was a huge estate near Valparaiso, north of Santiago. "I also remember my first object of desire. It was a vermilion, black-stripped kidney-shaped bean. I wanted it," she says with emphasis, "but I couldn't speak, I was too young to be able to ask for it and was powerless as I was lifted out of the cart, away from it."

She says, she hunted lizards with her sister: "I wanted to see if their tails fell off if you grabbed them. They did. We had to lie in waiting for them, they were very hard to catch." When she was four, her parents moved back to England. She has never returned but hopes to. "It's a kind of exoticism, I imagine South America as a continent of colour and contrasts."

Her parents were inveterate travellers. "My mother was always moving house. When I was seven I was dispatched to boarding school." Her childhood memories are dominated by images of being left with a nanny. "We never knew where our parents were. They were rather irresponsible, I suppose." This ongoing upheaval left her determined to create a home for her sons. "I never had one. I remember my little brother disappearing when I was seven. We didn't know where he was - he had died - but we were told nothing."

More than two years later, she was brought to his grave. "My father said to me `This is a Romanesque church, you can tell from the arch'. It was such a strange thing to say. Teaching me the difference between the Romanesque and Gothic. And then I saw this pathetically small little grave."

Hardly surprisingly, Anne and her elder sister Vivian were quite rebellious. "We were sent to a convent school and the nun there" - she names the nun slowly - "was responsible for a terrible crime: she pitted me against my sister over a swimming cap and damaged my sister's trust in me. I could never forgive that."

Ireland became very important to her and the Burren remains "my special place. It was the first great, open space I grew to know well". Vast open, unpopulated spaces are the territories Madden's work inhabits.

While she does not have a particularly strong historical sense, she is very historically aware: "But I think I live outside of it." An aspect of history which became part of her was the Holocaust. For Madden, history and justice are linked. "I remember going to a cinema in London with my sister. We were teenagers." The newsreel showed footage from the death camps. "I felt sick and we left. We never saw the film," she says and then recalls when she discovered John Hersey's Hiroshima. "I was doing library duty at school. Well, I was in fact doing my punishment for some subversion or other and I elected for tidying the library, I came upon this little book. It had a profound effect on me. Revelations of human savagery." Her father's death in a car accident left her at 14 with feelings of guilt and remorse. "I kept thinking if I had been better it would not have happened." Her early experience of pain through operations on her spine left her with a practical, almost careless attitude towards herself. It also gave her an awareness of her body: she paints on a scale relating to her own height and reach.

Her early married life in France seems idyllic - two artists working together, surrounded by olive trees, high in the mountains with, by the mid-1960s, two small sons. But in December 1968 a telegram arrived informing her of the deaths of her sister and brother-in-law in an air crash. They left three children. Madden was a co-guardian. "I helped, but of course, you can never replace parents." Sitting in their small Dublin home, which consists of two houses, including a large, north-facing studio, she comments about a recent hostile and unfair review given to a fellow painter. "A painter's work is their life blood. I'm not the first to say that, Picasso was. But it's true." Cruel reviews upset her sense of justice. She paces about. "I hardly ever sit, unless I'm eating. It hurts my back. I must be moving about. When I'm working, I put the canvas on the floor, against the wall. For me, painting is a very physical business." Already, her mind is on a show which will open in the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny Castle next June.

In 1991, her attitude towards her retrospective show was ambiguous. "They are strange, aren't they? I mean, a retrospective doesn't really mean anything till you're dead and the work is complete." Of the current exhibition, she says quietly: "This is the most important show of my life. It has given me the opportunity of showing a large body of mainly big works, which have preoccupied me for more than two years: it's been an intense, concentrated period." Did she ever, or does she still, feel overshadowed by Louis le Brocquy's reputation as an artist? "I never did. He was already famous when I married him . . . and I had been showing since I was 18. No, the fact I am married to Louis only seems to be important as regards my artistic life in Ireland. I completely accepted this here, and still do, but everywhere else I have my own identity. As an artist, I'm not necessarily linked to Louis. We belong to different generations, and as artists we are very different."

Her book, Seeing His Way, a study of Louis le Brocquy, was published in 1994. It was a difficult project, attempting to create the distance to write about someone she knows so well. "I felt I had to do it because I knew his life. I was on the scene, as it were. I never intended to be his biographer, his critic or his analyst. But I think it might be useful material for a future biographer." Looking at the book with hindsight, she says: "There are many famous names in it, our life as described in it seems very exciting. But then, how do you write about the ordinary days, the long, quiet days working together?"

For all her tragedies, she had a very long youth. "I did rather and I still feel youthful." At 65, she retains something of her angular, girlish beauty. "I never thought I was good-looking. My mother always introduced me as her plain, little girl, `so thin and peaky'." Madden's attitude to life remains of the moment. "The young live in the future, the old the past. I live in the present."

Both gregarious and solitary, she says: "I think a lot; I reflect. I often talk to myself. Stare mindlessly out of the window. I love that. I am a physical person but I do live in my mind. Sometimes I'd like to get out of it."