Brian Henderson moved to the United States to make art. But he also discovered a great way to live - in lofts that he began to create for his fellow artists, he tells Emma Cullinan
"New York was my art school," says Brian Henderson, sitting in his "New York loft" in a Dublin mews. The artist went to the Big Apple on a Macauley Fellowship in 1971, to work on painting for a year, and stayed for decades. "I liked NY, I fell in love and my girlfriend got me a loft which I fixed up. John Lennon lived next door."
Henderson came home early this century, his move hastened by a decline in loft availability in Manhattan, as real-estate reality hit, and because of the devastation at the Twin Towers. "I was living on West Broadway and Franklin and had been up all night. I went to bed at 6am and was woken by a call from Ireland, telling me about the plane crashing into the tower. I looked out of the window and saw the second plane go in - and threw up. I thought it was the end of the world. No one was running away; everyone was transfixed, like magnets. People were watching people raining out of the buildings: raining people. It was something."
His TriBeCa loft was being sold, and it was time to leave the city where he had shared the same hang-outs as iconic artists and musicians.
Still a bit of a night owl - he admits to having only just woken up when he greets me, approaching noon - Henderson reels off the Manhattan haunts he frequented at all hours, among the art glitterati. There was Fanelli's Cafe, which was in SoHo before the area even became SoHo. It was an artists' hang-out - and apparently still is for any artists left in his part of the city. "There were at least 10 huge parties every Saturday, and Fanelli's was the place to meet before partying."
Henderson also frequented Max's Kansas City, whose back room is the subject of the song Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed, a then customer, along with Andy Warhol and his crowd, its being handy for the Factory, Warhol's studio, which was just around the corner. "I used to hang out with all these people," says Henderson.
He was also a regular at St Adrian's Bar on Broadway, which he says was packed with artists. "At the time artists were like rock stars, and they had groupies: women came in from the suburbs." And then there was his loft on Broome Street, beside Lennon's pad, where "there were always people coming and going: the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan . . ."
Apart from being inspired by artists he socialised with, such as Donald Judd, Bryce Marden and Richard Serra - a coffee table he designed has a Serraesque stand - Henderson also took inspiration from musicians. He supplemented his income by constructing loft interiors for other creative beings, including Ornette Coleman, whose free-form jazz, says Henderson, tied in with the New York abstract expressionist school of painting. Jimi Hendrix was an earlier influence. "His music opened my eyes to freedom of expression." The expressionism in Henderson's art spilled over to his loft designs: "No one else wanted these buildings, and we could experiment and do different things with them."
Living in the space he worked in meant Henderson could paint at night, either rising from his bed when the urge became too great or staying up until the small hours. Back in Dublin he is still a sometime nocturnal painter - a trait facilitated by living in his studio, which he recently extended by adding on a kitchen and living space. "It's been hellish," he says of the building work, "and the construction of the brick exterior I wanted was a nightmare."
Having previously switched between decorating lofts and studios and painting in them, he was amazed that it took a year for his builders to construct his extension. "Things take ages in Dublin," he says.
Henderson is currently working on collages and "encaustic painting", in which he applies, and layers, beeswax on to aluminium. Similarly, he took his industrial-style blank canvas of a building - with its galvanised gutters dripping with drainage chains, the corrugated-iron kitchen ceiling and vast metal paint-cupboard doors - and filled it with strong pieces that hark back to an age where people, rather than machines, made metal objects.
The metallics begin with the solid metal front door, which sets a theme picked up through the interior, including in his shower door. His "alarm clock" is a copper water heater at the end of his bed that gurgles in the morning as it boosts the water temperature. The stove in the main studio space is a Romesse, which, says Henderson, is the same as one owned by the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
Africa is another influence, from the corrugated kitchen and living-room ceiling to the masks and shields hanging on the walls.
This place is robust and functional but homely, because it has wit and doesn't feel forbidding: you can do what you like here; the decor won't mind. Henderson left bare breeze blocks on the exterior wall and repeated them in his hallway. His friends tell him they look ugly, but he has memories of beautiful breeze blocks in New York lofts.
Henderson takes time to find the right thing - by, for example, flying in lights and classic loft chairs from New York or by having a slim spiral staircase built to reach his sleeping platform - but sometimes items come to him, such as kitchen-cupboard doors he garnered from the back of his glass supplier's truck.
The reason why the Twyfords ceramic basin in his bathroom is so deep and generous turns out to be because it is actually a cistern. Yet there are softer touches here, such as the Japanese-style screens in his hallway: this small studio house needs lots of storage, and there is an overflow in the garden, where an ivy-clad shed protects a vast array of art materials.
But the dominant space is the artist's studio itself, enlarged and lightened by having low-level radiators and skylights. Natural light is backed up by lots of artificial light: if Henderson works at night he needs a blaze.
Having carried a part of New York back with him, both in himself and outwardly expressed in his studio, he stills feels slightly out of sync. Wearing his trademark leather trousers and headscarf, he tells how those in his age group have arrived at a different place. "A lot of people my age are settled, and some have given up. I don't believe in all this settling-down stuff. Age is a difficult thing to deal with: over a certain age you are treated as if you are finished."
Yet his links with Ireland have been constant: all the time he was away he continued to show in Ireland, mainly at the Taylor Galleries, as well as internationally. He has just been accepted into Aosdána, which the Arts Council established in 1981 "to honour those artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland".
Now that the construction of his home is over, he relishes the chance to really get creative and respond to the increased interest in his art. "When I'm not working my work becomes disjointed," he says, "but now, if I live for long enough, I will have a much better run."