A New LifeBob Ryan tells Theresa Judge how the turns of life eventually led to freedom to paint whenever he chooses
A banker for more than 35 years, Bob Ryan at age 74 is finally devoting himself full-time to his painting.
He spent most of his life fitting his art around a day job. As it happens, his time in the bank was far from uneventful and provided the material for his book, With a Tap on the Knee - memoirs of a reluctant banker. He was public relations manager with AIB for some 16 years.
Painting was his "interest from the very beginning" - he started taking night classes in art while still a teenager. "I was doing in my spare time what I would have liked to have done full-time."
In the bank, surprisingly, he found some painting soul mates, including Tony O'Malley, who remained a lifelong friend. Other colleagues included actor T.P. McKenna, Bunnie Carr and Frank Delaney.
"There were writers, poets, not too many painters, but quite a few who wrote." Because jobs were so hard to come by at the time, he says, the bank had "a disparate, if not desperate, staff".
He says he doesn't have regrets. "What saved it were the wonderful characters who were in the bank. The friends I made, made the bank." He led "a dual existence" but was usually able to make time for his painting, often starting at 6am.
Throughout his banking years his work featured in many group and solo exhibitions, the first being with Tony O'Malley and James Manning in the Little Theatre in Brown Thomas in 1957. Soon after, O'Malley left the bank to paint full-time.
It was only when Ryan's family of four children, including son Eamon, now a Green Party TD, "were more or less grown-up and taken care of", he decided to take his chances on the outside world and persuaded the bank to give him early retirement in 1985.
It was shortly before this that he got the idea of restarting the "Wren Boys" in Dublin, a tradition he had grown up with in Cork. It's clear he still enjoys the idea of senior AIB executives waking up one morning to see a picture of their PR manager clad in a Henry VIII costume on the front of The Irish Times.
He enjoyed being PR manager as it gave him more freedom. "I was lucky in the time that I was in public relations in banking because I made up the rules as to what public relations represented - they didn't know," he adds with a chuckle. He decided it was more important to get out and build relations with journalists rather than spending time in bank headquarters.
Asked about subsequent events at AIB that have damaged its reputation considerably, he says he believes strongly that the culture of banking changed when bankers were replaced by accountants, and "bottom-line figures" became all important.
He also has strong views on why accountants should not have been let get into such a dominant position, because he believes a good banker "has a talent for seeing what will happen tomorrow" while an accountant is "trained to check what happened yesterday".
Taking early retirement, the idea was to paint full-time, but he was quickly lured into the job of editing a satirical magazine, Dublin Opinion - "two years of pure magic... because you met every lunatic in the country".
He subsequently started working with Cerebral Palsy Ireland (CPI), now Enable Ireland, as marketing and PR director, which he says "opened up another chapter" in his life.
In CPI he was among those who stressed the importance of art and music for people with disabilities. One of the people he worked with was Stephen Walsh, whose work is now in the National Museum of Modern Art.
Now he is free to paint whenever he chooses. The front room in the Sandycove home he shares with his wife Mary is his studio and gallery. "I think the paintings that I'm doing now are freer. A lot of paintings that I did in the 1950s and 1960s are dark, or even stressful, moody. Now there's more light."
He says this reflects the fact that he's more content with life now. At his stage in life, "you are letting go a lot of old nonsense that you probably thought was important" - such as "doing what the Jones's might like you to do, or being influenced by society and societal pressures".
But he doesn't seem to be someone who would ever have been very concerned with such pressures? "No, but you can't but be influenced in some ways - you're trying to constantly escape the influence, but it does become clearer and less stressful."
The responsibility and stress associated with supporting a family also eases, until, he laughs, "some of your children start to make statements in public". He says he used to go out and paint sketches but now finds that "what's inside your head is much more interesting".
Is he more able to enjoy life now? "It's to live, not so much enjoy, to live life. You begin to live it in other dimensions. You're free of the old rubbish that was hanging on you for so many years and you can express yourself, at least in paint I can."