Cypher - The Panic Artist

1971-6 – I was born in Dublin in 1971 the illegitimate child of a well to do nuvo-riche couple. I was the spit of my mother in looks, though I did share some features of my father.

My father was already married with three children but had left them and was 'living in sin' with my mother for years before my birth. Like many illegitimate boys before me - I was hostile towards authority and wanted to prove myself greater than those that had made me feel so small in my youth.

My parents were both working class company directors made good, and part of a privileged new class of bourgeois Irish entrepreneurs. I grew up as an only child - and like most only children - I was serious, responsible, ambitious, self-centred, but also highly self-critical.

My father was a reclusive grandfather like figure obsessed with the status symbols and trappings of wealth. My mother was utterly devoted to me, very loving - but also narcissistic, meglomanical, domineering, interfering and possessive. I lived a very privileged childhood, and went to the best schools, was tutored by au-pairs, had piano, fencing, riding and swimming lessons and wanted for nothing.

1977 – Without warning my father died of a brain hemorrhage, leaving me with an inheritance of two houses – which at the time were valued at over £90,000 (the same properties circa 2007 would be worth about e2,000,000).

After my fathers death, my life was to be dominated by the tormented and extreme personality of my mother, in fact the three most important people in my troubled life were all women; my mother, my first partner of over seven and a half years, Helen Black, and my second partner Carol Stevens all of whom I was crippling dependent upon.

However, my father's death did leave a huge hole in my life - which I filled with the influences of the old masters and early in my twenties with male mentors. Dad's death also made me think depressingly about my own mortality and drove me to make art with only the best quality materials - which I hoped would last for all time. Painting became for me a broker of immortality.

1979 – My mother suffered her first nervous breakdown the day my father died but it was not until July 1979 that she was first committed to a mental hospital. Over the following twenty years, my mum was committed repeatedly to mental hospital’s suffering from paranoid-schizophrenia, mania, anorexia, Benzodiazpan addiction and epilepsy. She launched insane and groundless legal battles with my father's estate, beat me up, emotionally tortured me and we were often penniless and sometimes starved. My mum's lies, delusions, paranoia and persecution mania terrified me and try as I might to reason with her, they had a deep impact on me. Her contempt and paranoia of doctors, solicitors, police, priests and nuns, left me with a primal distrust and animosity towards authority.

Thus my childhood was Dickensian in its mixture of inherited wealth, enforced poverty, fostering out to relatives, madness and intrigue. However, I never doubted that my mother loved me with all her heart, and no matter how sick she was, she always did her utmost to help me. In fact when she was well my mother was the kindest gentlest person you could hope to meet.

The experience of living with and caring for my mentally ill mother irrevocably distorted my view of life and women forever. I became paranoid and fearful of people who my mother when ill, taught me to contemptuously hate. I also came to have a pathological dread of women who I feared would hate and abuse me like my mother. I formed an unhealthy dependence on women and became emotionally, intellectually and sexually obsessed with them. I came to worship women and regard myself as nothing but an ugly worthless dog beside their divine beauty, power and sexiness.

In my everyday life, I became passive-aggressive, submissive, fatalistic and lazy. However, in private, art, literature, drawing and painting became an arena in which I could be hard working, active and courageous. But I also developed a sense of artistic self-entitlement out of all proportion to my actual abilities.

1980 – Seeking refuge from the hardships of my poverty stricken family life and deranged mother’s behavior, I withdrew introspectively into a rich artistic, sexual and military (wargaming) fantasy life and love for art. Western art, dominated as it was by dead white male artists, became a substitute father figure for me. My grandiosity and depression drove me to tell myself I was a genius in order to paint. Painting and drawing became a craft to be mastered and a privileged form of therapy. Art protected my weaker depressive self, made my life meaningful and death seemed cheated by it.

Withdrawing from society, from 1980-1992 I bizarrely sought to understand the human condition by turning exclusively to culture; television, movies, oil paintings, old master drawings, Rock bands, novels, history and philosophy books, erotic watercolours, pornographic magazines, feminist manifestos, classical composers, Greek Attic vases, primitive carvings, and Roman frescos.

1981 – I grew up with serious thirst for creative omnipotence. At the age of ten, I began to teach myself how to draw and paint. This was the start of my self-hypnoses in which I convinced myself I was a great artist in the making. Virtually nothing I painted from 1981-87 was of my own conception. Everything I made was a copy of old and modern master paintings. My first artistic influences were the French Impressionists; Renoir, Degas, Monet and Manet. I produced a wide variety of images in, oil paint, oil-pastels, chalk-pastels, charcoal and pencil, including still-life's, portraits, landscapes and nudes. My family thought art a frivolous and unworthy activity, and did little to encourage my aspirations.

Sexually I began dressing up in my mother's clothes and masturbating. Partly I did this to be close to my mother, partly because my sense of masculinity was so fragile and confused and partly I did it to find a pleasurable sexual release. I continued to dress in my mother's clothes until the age of sixteen. Meanwhile, I had lost all belief in God, and I could see absolutely no meaning to life and I was left feeling hopeless, depressed and lost. Meanwhile my mother was committed to a mental hospital twice during the year.

1982 – When I was eleven, I was informed by my mother's solicitor - that I had inherited a sizeable fortune, enough to allow me not to ever have to work. Having fallen in love with art, I decided to become an artist when I grew up. After such a childhood, the last thing I need was the insecurities of the avant-garde. Instead I settled down to study the old and modern masters.

I also began assiduously watching the Open University course on Modern Art; Modern Art and Modernism on BBC 2, which began my life long interest in art history. At home I began intensively studying western military history and started assembling a vast wargaming collection of model soldiers with which I recreated some of the great battles of history. I also began reading novelists like Dickens and Austen.

1983 – At age twelve I was already marked out as a future artist by my schoolteachers. My art teacher Mrs. Gabler in my spring report wrote; "I cannot think of sufficient superlatives with which to laud [Cypher]’s outstanding talent. He seems destined for an artistic career." My Headmaster’s J.S. Steepe wrote in his report; "This is a most encouraging report. [Cypher] is obviously working well and making pleasing progress. I am particularly pleased to hear of his outstanding potential in art."

However with my trust fund unable to pay my school fees, I was taken out of the private Sandford Park Prep school, and I was dumped by my relatives into Greendale community school in Kilbarrack - one of Dublin’s poorest neighbourhoods. Where I was remorselessly bullied for over a year. Meanwhile my mother was committed to a mental hospital twice during the year. I began masturbating and fantasizing compulsively.

In my fantasies women and girls I knew, would aggressively humiliate me, belittle me, force me kiss their shoes and feet, and to perform cunnilingus. They would seduce and rape me, and piss and shit on me. In these fantasies, I was passive, submissive and abused by women whom I imagined as grotesque pagan abusers who sought nothing other than my utter degradation and humiliation. I find it easy to admit to these thoughts but the other fantasize I had bring tears to my eyes when I remember them. In these other daydreams I was seduced and loved by women and given all the admiration, kisses, cuddles and tender affection I was denied in my real life.

1984 – During the Easter school holidays, I took the first of four two week-long watercolour crash-courses with the marine, equestrian and landscape painter Bryan Byrnes, in his studio in Ballsbridge. Byrnes was a third rate kitsch realist. As a result, I began to work exclusively in watercolours. However Byrnes made me far too dependent on copying and did not encourage me to work from life. In the autumn I painted my very first erotic artwork, a small watercolour copy of Courbet`s 'The Sleeper's', a languid oil painting of two naked women sleeping together after sex.

In deathly secret I also began making erotic drawings based on my sexual fantasies of my family, friends and teachers, accompanied by pornographic speech bubbles and plot lines - I was only thirteen but my keen passion for erotica had already emerged.

1985 - My mother and I moved to a new house in North Dublin, where I would live for the rest of my life. My mother's health improved and between 1985-1993 my mother was only committed twice to a mental hospital, once in 1987 after I had quit school and once in 1991 after I had attempted suicide. In fact my mother not only began working again for the first time since my fathers death, she also bent over backwards to make up for our past hardships and her abuse of me.

However just as our lives became settled, I found the delayed reaction to my childhood wash over me and I began to suffer from depression and grandiosity. I was withdrawn and wild, studious and imaginitive, realistic and idealistic, passionate and skeptical, undisiplined and independent, tormented and enthusiastic, rebellious and conservitive, realistic and idealistic and easily hurt - I detested stupidity and social injustice.

1986 – At night, during the winter months - I took oil painting classes with the kitsch photo-realist painter Brian Mc Carthy, at the teacher’s studio in Clontarf. During the year, I produced a number of still-life's in watercolours, influenced by Dutch still-life paintings of the seventeenth century. However, van Gogh was undoubtedly my biggest influence at the time and he would remain a huge influence throughout my career.

In school, I attended less and less, and everyone knew I was on the verge of leaving school to pursue art full time. On my Christmas report, Ms Glackin my tutor expressed her exasperation at my solipsism; "[Cypher] has a great deal of potential. But this cannot be realized if he continues to cop out every time he does not find reality to his liking. I should love to see more fighting spirit in him, not a crumbling at every obstacle." While my art teacher Helen Gibson who had for two years described me as an "excellent student" wrote; "Must develop his natural talent."

1987 – Tired of delaying my pursuit of an artistic life, I willfully left school - only two weeks before my sixteenth birthday. I told my family and teachers I was leaving school to: “become a great artist!” I lived like an invalid recluse, dressed like a dandy and already saw my work as very anti art-world.

In January my mother forced me to have an interview with Dr Campbell Bruce in N.C.A.D., he told me I would not get into art college on my current portfolio, but he wished me luck. Insecure about my abilities, from 1987-1993, I began to backdate my work by as little as a month or as much as a year.

During the year I produced a series of strong graphic and detailed watercolours (which I used more like a heavy bodied gouache paint) based on old photographs from Vogue magazines of the 1920`s and 1930`s and influenced by the paintings and drawings of Ingres - they were the highly mannered works of a dandy. These early paintings displayed the same strong linear, graphic and unpainterly touch and tendency towards illustration, which would become a technical hallmark of most of my later work. At the same time I also created photo-collages and was influenced by the work of Amedeo Modigliani, Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, Maurice de Vlaminck, Paul Klee, and Kasimir Malevich. However, by the end of the year I settled upon a course of works inspired by the watercolour self-portraits and pubescent nudes of Egon Schiele. Schiele`s work convinced me that erotic art could be as heroic and compulsive as religious or history paintings, and I put the human body at the center of my art.

That year I also produced my first self-portraits, including a pair of images of myself as a transsexual, which documented my gender confusion. I also began to make drawing cartoons which from 1987-1992, I used to make various variations of my images in different mediums and styles. Meanwhile I collected books on erotic art and photography. In late 1987, I had my first formal therapy sessions with a councilor, the main subject of which was the difficulties I had coping with living with my mother.

1988 – Threatened with the suspension of my trust fund, I was forced to return to School. Not willing to return to Greendale Community School - I went instead to; Sandymount Highschool, in Ballsbridge.

During the year, I painted such photo derived realist alkyd paintings as; Country Road, Vogue Model and Large Nude. I became obsessed with Picasso and his monstrous productivity. Picasso`s unbridled creativity inspired me to make my art as varied and unrestrained as I could. Like Picasso, I too wanted to prove my virtuoso ability to paint and draw in any style or medium. I decided that my life would only be worth living if I became a greater artist than Picasso and I frantically tried to paint and draw as many works as he had by my age. This desperate obsession to beat Picasso, and prove myself against the very best, would eventually break me, and was partially responsible for my first suicide attempt three years later.

Meanwhile I began reading Nietzsche, going to Art House movies and reading modernist novelists like Sartre, Camus, Nabokov, Kundera, Beckett, Joyce and Dostoyevsky. I started wearing all black, at all times, and listened to morose bands like The Smiths. I was a typical moody teenage outsider, determined to make very different art from those who came before me.

My paintings from 1988-1995 were most diverse in character. I was forever examining the creative principals of modern art. I produced a huge variety of works; from minutely shaded pencil drawings, to roughly painted self-portraits, to chaotic pure text paintings, to complex collaged works on paper. Art helped me to explore my inner demons, in a way that did not hurt or victimise others. It also helped me to communicate to the wider world my feelings.

1989 – Knowing that I was adamant in my refusal to take either the intermediate-certificate or leaving-certificates, and by now on the verge of being expelled from school, my art teacher Mr. Sheils, insisted on talking with me. He told me I had such exceptional talent that I could get into art college without any scholastic qualifications. Mr. Sheils persuaded me to apply to all three Art Colleges in Dublin - based on my portfolio alone. After two interviews and a painting and drawing exam - I was subsequently accepted by Dun Laoghaire Art College. This was a tremendous achievement, since only a handful of students were ever granted such irregular entries without scholastic qualifications.

Part of my portfolio included the medium scale, linear (overly hard) shaded pencil drawings; Self-Portrait with My Mother in Florida, and St. Theresa in Ecstasy (After Bernini), Marsyas Slain. In the meantime, I painted the morbid alkyd painting; Two Figures in a Darkened Room and drew the homoerotic pencil drawing Nude Self-Portrait From Behind.

The work I produced between February 1989 and October 1995 was my most explosive, compulsive and obsessively committed. The tests I set for myself from 1988-95 (realist oil painting, nudes, group compositions and large-scale oil paintings) were the hardest of my career. In April, I visited Los Angles with my mother, for two weeks. While there I visited all of the cities major art Museums and also traveled with my mother to Las Vegas for the weekend, while there I bought my first hard-core pornographic magazines, which became the source material for my pornographic canvases in 1991.

My early work abounded with a fervent sexual imagination and I had a voracious visual and sexual appetite. The powerful pre-existing distress of my mother's illness drove me to seek more and more solace in masturbation, and fantasy. I felt dead inside and I wanted to avoid being aware of that existential pain. I was terrified of the emotional power I felt women had over me. I was fearful of modern women's demands to be sexually satisfied. In real life swingers and female deviants filled me with suspicion and fear, and I avoided them like the plague. However, unlike real life, pornography was incredibly safe. There was no danger of judgment, rejection, manipulation or attack from women in pornography. In pornography, male supremacy was assured and women were slavishly compliant to male desire. In pornography women were always ready and willing and were enthralled by men. Whereas in real life most women had higher job status to me and seemed to have it all, managing to combine career and motherhood.

Just like drugs, pornography provided me with a quick fix, and a masturbatory universe I could lose myself in. Pornography also suited my voyeuristic and intellectual nature and need for safety and solitude. My art was a uniquely Irish response to pornography shaped by a life-time of Irish Republican censorship and Catholic repression. From the outset, pornography, like my art and my study of erotic paintings and novels, became a therapeutic out let for me. Pornography allowed me to find a desperate and lonely release from my isolation, as well as a haven from the pressures of failed courtship with liberated women, who may have been up for casual sex with charming or good looking or confident or wealthy and socially connected men but not with a timid and depressed art nerd like me. Through pornography, I was able to fuel my obsession with women from a safe distance.

1989-90 - Keen for parental approval, I reluctantly began my Fine Art Degree in Dun Laoghaire Art College. Dun Laoghaire gave me my first opportunity to work from the nude life model. However, I was only in Art College two months when I got into a fight with, Henry Smith, the son of the Principal John Smith. I willingly took the blame for the fight and the incident went down on my permanent record.

A hard-core narcissist in my youth, self-portraits abound in my oeuvre. In the privacy of my home, I painted (while still in collage) a wretched self-portrait of myself masturbating, which I called; Totem - in this square canvas I crossed the earthy chiaroscuro of Rembrandt with modern photo-realism. Paintings like Totem were an attempt to bridge the gap between my tortured self and a dishonest world I sought to change through the truth of my personal example.

Back in college, I eventually majored in sculpture - only after being refused painting because of my dismal attendance record. After only a year, I was expelled having failed my first year assessment. Having left college, I vowed to pursue my art career full time. However, I was shy and self-loathing, I had limited energy, I lacked confidence and had no contacts in the art world. The chances of me making a mark in the art world were slim to none.

1990 – In August, I visited Paris for two weeks with my mother. While there, I gorged on the art galleries with my mum by day and accompanied my mother about town at night. When I returned to Dublin, I came heavily under the influence of Neo-Expressionists like; Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel, Anslem Kiefer, Francisco Clemente, Sigmar Polke and David Salle. Between 1990-91 I saw a number of exhibitions in Dublin featuring the German Neo-Expressionist painters; Kiefer, Penck, Kippenberger, Oehlen, Baselitz, Hodicke, Fetting and Middendorf - whose work had a profound effect on my art, and gave me the courage to pursue expressionist painting even more intensely.

Late in the year, I started to go out every weekend to Mc Gonagles rock nightclub on South Anne Street. Crippled with shyness I would sit all night on my own or aggressively dance amongst the revelers. Since my mother despised me I presumed I was ugly, worthless and a bore to women. My shyness broke my heart and left me alone in the crowds of the city. Women were divided into two groups for me, high and mighty virgins who made me feel dirty for my lust, and man-eaters who threw me into an impotent panic. These feelings were echoed in my art.

Alternative grungy clubs like Mc Gonnagles and Fibber Mc Gee`s would be my home for the next ten years. Meanwhile my work - documented my withdraw from the world – but also my watchful eye on it through; television, cinema, newspapers, and fashion and pornographic magazines. My paintings of women were the handiwork of a voyeur - who both feared and was repelled by women – but who could not rid himself of his need, love, lust and longing for them. Time and again my work depicted a fragile thin young man voluntarily humiliated by women. . During the year I produced paintings like Woman and Man Kissing in a Darkened Street, Tender and Abattoir.

1991 – By the age of twenty, I was a complete and utter failure in the eyes of my mother, family, school teachers and art tutors. I had never had a job, I had no friends, I had never had a girlfriend, I was still a virgin and I had not sold a single painting or drawing.

Now a full-time painter, I painted no fewer than seventy-five self–portraits and numerous pornographic canvases, which announced a new fluency and transgressive commitment in my work. My work was full of nervous energy, passion and lust. Sex or rather voyeurism and masturbation, was certaintly the driving force behind my early pornorgaphic works. My explosive paintings became containers for my pain and were notable for their self-hatred, self-pity and anger towards the world. I began to paint in an ad-hoc instinctive manner and placed huge value on inspired accident.

I moved through different styles week by week. My traumatic and insane life made it impossible for me to see the world through one fixed style. I had to live in the moment and paint what I thought imperative at the time. It is said that a sufferer of a Borderline Personality Disorder can talk with a psychiatrist for over five hours about themselves, and the psychiatrist is still left feeling they do not know the true personality of the suffer.

My first psychiatrist Dr Anne Maguire in her notes, remarked that I had a "very unusual personality", and that it "was difficult to have empathy" with me. As a result of my chaotic and traumatic childhood, and my subsequent Borderline Personality Disorder, I had no fixed emotional, intellectual, sexual or artistic identity. Largely as a result of my Borderline Personality disorder, I was in a state of permanent identity crisis and permanent stylistic crisis.

I painted expressionist/realist masterpieces like Self-portrait with Clenched Fist, Self-Portrait Screaming in Blue, Self-Portrait Wasting Away and Inferno. Many of these nude self-portraits are a cry for help from a world that would not listen. However, my new achievements came at a price. During the year, I became increasingly withdrawn, I neither saw nor talked to anyone and consequently I slid into a chronic depression. In an effort to get out of the house, I attended life-drawing sessions in The City Arts Center.

Meanwhile I studied Existential philosophers like Schopenhauer, Sartre, Kierkegaard and Heidegger and dramatists like Samuel Beckett - which only served to plunge me into further despair. I worked extremely rapidly on my paintings of 1991, faster than in my whole career. I was desperate to capture the immediacy of my reactions to visual stimulus, and the emotions they provoked in me. I had periods of depression and lethargy followed by bouts of frenzied activity.

In late April, crushed by a year of total isolation and depression, I started to sign my paintings; ‘Cypher’ (by which I meant I was a worthless artist of no importance). It was for me an external proof of my sense of failure as a man and an artist.

By September 1991, my competition with Picasso had mentally broken me. Between 1987-1991 I had created around 215 paintings and drawn around 55 drawings. However by the same age Picasso had made about 307 paintings and drawn (sketchbooks included) around 1718 drawings. Even my obsessive backdating could not bridge this enormous gap! Moreover, what work I had managed to produce, lacked Picasso's sheer technical skill and originality.

Then in October, I made the first of nine suicide attempts (from October 1991 – January 1994), and I was incarcerated in St. Ita`s mental hospital for the first of three times (the second coming in December 1991, when both my mother and I were committed in St. Ita`s and the last in June 1992). I was diagnosed with a Borderline Personality Disorder and depression. Dr Bernard Murphy, interviewed me upon my admission to St. Ita`s on 10th October 1991, and recorded: "Would like to sort his will out and paint 40 more paintings before he kills himself." Those forty paintings would have rounded off my oeuvre to over 300 works. Why did I want to kill myself? There were many reasons, but fundamentally, it was because I could not see any place for myself in the world, my life seemed existentially meaningless, and I was plagued by sexual shame.

During my first admittance to St Ita`s - I was give six electric shock treatments to cure my depression. Even after my last suicide attempt in 1994, I had three further episodes of self-mutilation in 1994, 1995 and 1997, all of which were made after fights with women I knew. Meanwhile I painted such joyless pornographic paintings as Quenched Skin and Big Swinging Mickey.

My more tongue in cheek sexual paintings like Big Swinging Micky were easier for the public to relate to, as they were more whimsical and lighthearted. Where as my other work from this period was so aggressive and in your face - that the viewer could not bond with me as an artist or as a man. My pornographic paintings were an attempt to gain power over women who in real life I ran from in terror, and they were riddled with performance anxiety.

In the winter, I began reading Picasso A Life written by John Richardson. Over the following ten years I read and reread this book over twenty times, taking copious notes along the way. Richardson's biography became the standard I aspired towards in my own writing. I also read numerous feminist texts, sex surveys, and erotic authors like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. After Christams I had to commit my mother to St. Ita's distraught I attempted suicide twice in the space of two days, and I was subsequently committed to St. Ita's myself.

1992 - I was released from St. Ita's in February and I attended the cognitive behavioral therapist Mary Harris, who I would visit for over a year and a half. Through these sessions I came to understand how my childhood had affected me. While in therapy, Harris made me take a psychological test to judge my self-esteem. Much to my delight, she informed me that I had the lowest self-worth of any client she had ever had.

Meanwhile I painted a handful of images of women pointing and laughing at male strippers. Nineteen-Ninety-Two was a fractured and segmented working year for me. My work was disrupted by depression, suicide attempts, hospital incarcerations and decadent trips to Amsterdam. My experimentations in abstraction and text-based work produced few exceptional works and a lot of dross. I also abandoned a number of technically difficult realist paintings because I did not have the strength to complete them. My art became more and more fragmented and I lost direction, focus and organisation. The craziness of my life was reflected in the formlessness of much of my work.

Despite my hostility towards art colleges, I firmly believed that working from the life model was a crucial part of an artists training, so during the year, I began attending a series of classes in N.C.A.D. including; life-painting with Tom Mc Guirk, life drawing with Mary Burke and modeling in clay from the life-model with Pat Fortune. My hero of life-painting was Lucien Freud who's work I looked at intensely and learnt greatly from.

In May tortured by my virginity and lack of love - I made my first of four decadent sojourns to Amsterdam – the Sodom of my day. In Europe’s sex and drug capital, I lost my virginity to one of the cities many prostitutes. I subsequently returned three more times to Amsterdam (November 1992, May 1993, February 1995) - having sex; seventy times with thirty-nine different women. Every day while in Amsterdam - I spent many hours in the; Van Gogh, Stedelijk and Rijksmuseum.

When I returned from Amsterdam I was so guilty about having gone to prostitutes that I attempted suicide again. I was committed to St. Ita's for my third and final stay. When I returned home, I produced many collages, worksheets and sketchbook pages documenting my thoughts on Amsterdam and the sex trade. During the summer - I concentrated on making medium scale gestural and lyrical abstract paintings. These abstracts were some of the weakest, most derivative and slap-dash works in my whole oeuvre. Seen together they have some semblance of meaning, but seen individually they are often frankly meaningless - because all one can gather is their superficial qualities of colour and design. But they should be looked at as poetic works of visual memory better read as musical rather than narrative in quality. In fact they condensed my brushwork, colour and design at the time outside of any figurative impulse.

In September I attempted suicide again, but this time I was not committed to St. Ita's. In November I went again to Amsterdam for five days, where I smoked hashish, visited prostitutes and haunted the galleries by day. Moreover I saw a major retrospective of Sigmar Polke. While on my trips to Amsterdam I produced a number of drawings related to the red light district.

1992-2007 - Although I had produced paintings incorporating text like Fuck Post-Modernism in 1989 and works like Kill Me and My Life is Shit in 1991, it was not until 1992 that text really became an obsession with me. Often my paintings featured painted sub-frames - with critical subtitles which contextualised the images. The result was I produced a growing series of paintings and conceptual collages dominated by text and had a diminished interest in purely figurative painting. Those realist paintings I did make like Fellatio with Black Streaks 1992, and Subculture 1993, were increasingly over written with text or obscured by abstract interjections.

1992-2007 - A child of the chemical generation, I began my extensive derangement of the senses, becoming a habitual user of Hashish and Amylnitrate and to a lesser extent; Ecstasy, L.S.D., Cocaine, Speed, and Magic Mushrooms. Under the influence of Hashish, I would draw some of my freest and most experimental drawings, however hashish would also dull my painterly ambition and reduce the complexity of my work. Despite taking many drugs I did not credit them with any creative benefits. I loathed the mythology of 1960`s culture which led people to believe that great achievements of literature, music or art could be aided with drugs. They could not. All great art I knew was based more upon rigorous training, constant hard work and a measure of good luck.

1992-7 - I became aware of the work of 'Young British Artists' like Damien Hirst, Mark Quinn, Gary Hume, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers. Although their work was conceptual, it also had an expressionist rawness, which attracted me. However since their work was mostly conceptual or sculptural it had no technical impact on my art. In fact the sense of artistic isolation I felt throughout my art life was almost total. Apart from Neo-Expressionism in the early 1980`s, no artistic movement from late 1950`s Pop art on had any meaning to my art technically or philosophically and I hated most conceptual, video, photographic, performance, installation, feminist, gay, protest and nationalist art with a vengeance. I was bored to tears by the feeble conceptual one-liners that populated the contemporary galleries of every city I visited. I loathed the lack of skill, sophomoric 'intellectualism' and trivial pursuit of most conceptual art, which I found pretensions, mind numbingly banal. I was disgusted by the academic and media obsessed nature of conceptual artists and laughed at their supposed intellectual sophistication, which seemed to wallow in sound bite art. I demanded that art deal with the biggest issues of existence, to speak with frank honesty, be self-critical, and continue the grand tradition of western painting, which I saw as the high point of human visual culture.

1993 - In January I confessed to my psychotherapist that I had backdated my paintings and drawings. Believing my life was finished I attempted suicide nine hours later, however I did not succeed, and I subsequently stopped backdating my work.

Early in the year I sold my last £33,000 worth of stocks and used the money to buy art materials and travel. In a flurry of activity, I painted such essential large-scale realist and expressionist works as; Librium, Sodium Amytal, ShowTime, The Trauma of The Voyeur, The Trauma Unit and The Three Sisters. My pornographic paintings were frequently painted with great care and technical sophistication, a total rebuke to those who would dismiss them as adolescent, puerile or merely provocative.

Seeking the support and structure of college again, I applied in late May to; The Dublin Institute of Technology College of Marketing Art and Design, Mountjoy Square - for a place in second year painting. However, my application was turned down - and later the Head of Fine Art denounced my art to my mother as: “The most violent and pornographic we have ever seen!” The Head of Fine art also hinted that they would fear for the safety of their pupils - given the report they had from Dun Laoghaire on my fight with Henry Smith in 1989. Distraught by my failure to get into college I later in the week attempted suicide twice in the space of three days.

Despite being heterosexual - early in September I met and fell in love with Edward Tynan. Edward would be the first of only two male lovers I had. The second was the decadent journalist and critic, Robert Fagan. At a time in my life when no woman would touch me, the love of these two men soothed my suicidal despair. However, I never came with these men and never committed sodomy. Moreover, I never fantasized gay sex or was sexually attracted to men, and I never had sex with any man after I found women who would love me and have sex with me. After meeting Edward, I moved out of my home and lived for three months with him, later I lived alone, for a year in a bed-sit in Ballsbridge.

1994 – In January after Edward broke up with me I made my last attempt at suicide - but quickly called for help. Edward and I remained good friends however and through Edward Tynan I met the journalist Robert Fagan and through him; the journalist Mic Moroney, and through Mic Moroney the artists; Shane Cullen, Michael Arbuckle, Julian King and Danielle Kraay. After years of having no peers with whom I could relate my art to, I was finally blessed with the artistic company of others I respected - and who respected me! The common thread between all of us was a concern with content in art and a loathing of bogus conceptual art theory and formalism.

During the year, I created such raw graffitied collages as; Never Social, Capitalism and The Money Shot and God Help Me. A firm supporter of my paintings, Mic Moroney began to show my work around various Dublin art galleries.

As a result of Moroney`s efforts, I had my first solo exhibition in October at The Head gallery, The Ormond Multi-Media Centre Dublin. - where I exhibited five very large oil paintings, including; The Trauma Unit 1993, The Three Sisters 1993 and Oxygenate 1993.

Also in October, despite having no ambitions as a writer, I began to write; The Panic Texts and The Panic Artist. The text was initially written in the third person and the past tense - a further example of my strange compulsion to deconstruct my life and art. What started as a four-page manifesto later became a huge thousand page literary tome. It was only in 2002 that I eventually rewrote The Panic Artist and The Panic Texts in the first person. My texts recorded my trials of seduction; anxiety, satisfaction that then brought remorse and feelings of abandonment, jealousy and the sorrow of separation.

My life after 1994, moved in a very different direction, I stopped attempting suicide, I stopped sleeping with men, my depression eased, I slowly gained new friendships and started to date women.

1995 - In January I acquired my final inheritance, I sold my house in Clontarf for £55,000 (money I used for art materials and travel) and moved back to my family home which I now owned. In February I spent nine days in Amsterdam with Edward, were I smoked hashish, took cocaine, had sex with prostitutes and went to the galleries every day.

After returning home, I resumed painting with a renewed intensity. I produced large scale paintings like; St. Theresa of Avila, The Dialectic Of Emotions, False Dawn, and The Broken Staff, as well as a series of small scale paintings like 'Worship' and finally conceptual assemblages entitled Dear Woman, in which I juxtaposed, a confessional letter to 'Dear Woman', with a pornographic photograph cut from a magazine and medication boxes.

In the early summer, in an effort to disperse my work more widely, I sent thirteen framed paintings to Mic Moroney`s house, and asked all my friends to pick a painting to keep. After a year, only three had been taken - and they were subsequently returned. This failure to give away my work, came as another harsh blow to me.

Late in the year I had three one-night-stands with girls who had approached me in Fibber McGee`s rock club, which did my self-confidence a great deal of good. I also read and reread 'Parallel Visions' the catalogue to a major exhibition of outsider art and 'Anti-Oedipus' by Deluze and Guttarii, which together radicalized my identity as an outsider artist.

1996 - Early in the year I applied to the Irish Art's Council, for an art flight to see a retrospective of Jean Michel Basquiat, at The Serpentine gallery in London. My application was granted and I flew to London were I was spellbound by my hero's canvases.

I began to produce a series of traced pornographic ink drawings with cartoon speech bubbles. At first the dialogue in these drawings were sexually related to the action in the drawings but later I began to add more absurd and autobiographical text. I also began to produce a series of 'Love Paintings' in oil-stick and pencil on paper in which I immortalized my love and gratitude towards girls I had known. These works were typical of many of my text-based works which were controversial because of their technical simplicity and use of words.

In September after a handful of meaningless one-night-stands with girls, I finally met a woman who returned my devotion in kind, that wonderful woman was Helen Black. She was my first girlfriend and the most important influence on my adult life. Helen became my lover, best friend, surrogate mother, cook, secretary and later even my assistant curator.

Because of my increased socialization, my new girl friend and my new-found peace of mind, my work lacked the obsessional quality - which had characterized it since 1987. My paintings lost the unbridled energy of my youthful work and became more understated and restrained. I continued to create great individual paintings and drawings, but overall my work lost much of its energy, emotional intensity, conceptual complexity and rebellious anarchy. What work I did make was often very slap-dash and quickly executed. I made a drastic move away from realist paintings towards text, abstract and conceptual drawings and paintings. The move was influenced by the works of Schnabel, Basquiat, Twombly and the spirit of Outsider artists like Antonin Artaud, Adolf Wolfli, Henry Darger and August Walla.

Fortune finally shone on me when in October – through Robert Fagan`s efforts - I secured my first major exhibition 'Artefacts of a Crisis,' at The Garden of Delights. I exhibited sixty-four paintings and drawings including works like; Self-Portrait Screaming in Blue, The Dominance of Consumption, False Dawn, and pornographic canvases like; Librium and Amylnitrate. I also provided a 40-page version of The Panic Text. Mic Moroney asked Mebh Ruane to review the exhibition. An old-school feminist in matters of pornography - Ruane patronizingly reviewed my exhibition in The English Sunday Times; ‘[Cypher], Garden of Delights.’ During the exhibition, I gave my first artist's talk at The Garden of Delights bookshop. However yet again I failed to sell a single painting.

1997 - During the year I had another one-man exhibition in The Globe Bar on Georges Street - and showed work in Grogans pub on South William Street – both in Dublin.

In mid May 1997, I produced four medium sized acrylic paintings on collaged photographs mounted on 300lb Arches watercolour paper. The weakest of these was a rather adolescent looking self-portrait. The strongest - 'Pissy' depicted a water-sport mange-a-trios. The use of photographs under the painting proved very effective, but it was not something I repeated very often. Because my work was often not very beautiful to look at, and was judgmental and critical of human beings, it could often be very unsavory - as in works like 'Pissy.' There was none of the vast well spring of humanity one can find in artists like Goya – even when he is dealing with horrific subjects.

In July I visited London with Helen for three days and had by work rejected by three more English galleries. My works of 1996-2002 were a vortex of confused experiences, overwhelmed by an awful and deliberate formlessness. The arbitrary colour, crude gestures and slashes of paint and oil paint-stick of my hastily executed drawings found few admirers in the conservative Irish art world. That year I produced over-painted pornographic magazine pages like 'King', which marked a new approach to my art making which reduced painting to its simplest conceptual components. Photo-collages like these were deceptively simple works – but in fact - those that I chose to keep were always the best of a mixed bunch. The difficulty of such work was the danger of over or under-working them. Under-worked they looked glib and impersonal – over-worked they looked obscure and turgid. I destroyed many of these photo-collages as soon as they were unsuccessfully completed – or later in 1995 – when in a fit of self-critical anger I disposed of them.

I also produced a series of 'War Maps' in which I over-painted war maps from World War Two, with text and gestural abstract shapes. As a continuation of these works, I produced Plans for World Domination in which I over-painted a large globe with text and gesural abstract shapes. My 'War Map' paintings were expressions of impotent power by a social outcast and recluse.
Late in the year, Helen Black off her own bat, catalogued the vast oeuvre of paintings and drawings executed by me over the previous eleven years. When not painting I was attending drunken openings in the Dublin art world and reading art critics like Greenberg, Rosenberg, Kuspit, Mc Evilley, Tolstoy and Wilde, and philosophers like Nietzsche, de Sade and Schopenhauer.

1998-2000 – By the end of 1997 – painting was very much a secondary vocation to my growing concern with my writing. In part this shift was a result of my poverty and inability to afford canvas or paint. Thus 1998-1999 was to be one of my least productive periods in my whole career.

In July 1998, I painted 'I am a Failure' and later I painted 'I am a Failed Artist', both of which documented my utter loss of self-confidence as an artist. It was strikingly arrogant and modern of me to assume that mere painterly gesture and scrawled words would be seen as the signs of great mastery.

I thus began painting the first of my 'Unitary' paintings, which started with works like Failure of Nerve, and Art is Fucking Worthless and culminated with works like Anal abstraction. These are works of calculated dead-pan madness. In these paintings I collaged liner realist pornographic paintings onto minimal abstract mounts and over-painted them both with organic abstract shapes and graphic text. The over all impact was of clashing colours, textures and styles, which served to cancel each other out and to confound interpretation. By answering one kind of painterly grammar with another and then yet another, I sought to undermine all my various styles. I did not have faith in my painterly language so by suspending two or three or four different grammars in one work, I sought to close down the possibility of my critics and audience to judge the meaning of my paintings. It was a strategy of annoyance and rebuke to the art world and a form of creative self-denial and self-critique.

Meanwhile I slowly stopped buying art magazines like Art Forum and Frieze and lost interest in contemporary art, which I found increasingly irrelevant to my art. The only art magazine I did buy was Modern Painters (which I had avidly read since 1991) – but I stopped buying that in 2002 when its became just another promoter of crap conceptual art. I attended numerous openings in galleries in Dublin and invariably got into drunken verbal fights with other artists. My boyish and boorish self-confidence did nothing to help ingratiate me to others in the art world.

1999 – I visited Barcelona, with my girlfriend Helen Black, her sister Karen and Karen’s boyfriend Ali Martinez. I visited the Picasso, Dali and Miro, museums and saw Jardi d`eros, a groundbreaking exhibition of erotic and pornographic art. The honour guard of narrow minded and stupid aesthetes who rejected my art out of hand was a long one.
After I returned from Barcelona I received another rejection from a gallery - this time from the erotic art gallery; Gallerie 1900 - 2000 in Paris. Bringing my total number of rejections from, art galleries, art colleges, art critics and the Irish Art's Council to thirty-four. Most artists are rejected at one time or another but considering that even my critics admitted I had talent, the variety, number and hostility of my rejections was bewildering.

In May 1999 – I re-read Brian Sewell’s Alphabet of Villains with great delight. I had read it first in 1995 and hated both him and his writings – but after a lifetime of rejections from the art world – I came to adore his bursting of the inflated artistic reputations of conceptual artists of the 1990’s.

That year I also painted numerous new works like 'Las Alegres Incestuoses', 'Amores Bestiales' and 'Table Top Portrait No.2' on such unusual supports as the cushions of dinning-room chair seats. I also produced numerous minimal traced ink drawings derived from acetate tracings from the television, which I over painted with organic abstract interjections.

From September 1999, I became a habitual user of Hashish when painting and became dependent on it, to ease my lack of self-confidence as an artist. Hashish, gave me a groundless sense of euphoria, robbed me of any critical perspective on my art and encouraged me to produce quick technically unchallenging work instead of time-consuming paintings.

2000 - In May after three and a half years together, Helen broke up with me. Before breaking up, Helen and I had argued constantly about our lack of money, my selfishness, my dependence upon her and my failure to make enough effort to push my art career. However within seven months we had reunited.

On May 26th - Just when I had begun to believe my critic's poor opinion of me to be right –I sold my very first works (eleven pencil drawings for £550) to Paul O`Kelly of the Oisin Art Gallery. O`Kelly had been tipped off about my work by Mic Moroney. Later Mr. Donal Mc Neela the owner of Oisin Art Gallery came out to see my work. It was agreed by Mc Neela and O`Kelly to give me a major one-man show later that year.

On August 13th - Gayle Killilea writing for the Sunday Independent wrote the first major interview with me; ‘Gayle Killilea met subversive artist Cypher, who intends turning the art world inside out.’ On 9th November, my first major gallery exhibition opened; Twenty Years of Panic Art, which was a retrospective exhibition of ninety-nine of my paintings and drawings from 1988-2000.

The 99 works in my retrospective represented less than 3 % of my enormous output of finished loose-leaf drawings and paintings (none of my cursory and crude sketchbook drawings were included in the exhibition).

The exhibition received extensive newspaper and media coverage, including a feature article by Mic Moroney and scathing, outraged and dismissive reviews by Ben Quinn, Helen Murray and Ian O`Doherty. Critical reviews in Irish newspapers were as rare as hens-teeth, so this collection of them - clearly reflected a widespread contempt for my work. I was also interviewed by Lorraine Keane for TV3 news and my exhibition was reviewed by John Hunt and Miles Dungan on RTE1`s radio program; Rattlebag.

By the end of the exhibition, I had sold e37,000 worth of paintings and drawings including e10,792 for the large-scale triptych The Dialectic of Emotions 1995. Later I was nominated by the singer Gavin Friday - for the Glen Dimplex Award. Friday was one of the seven judges on the I.M.M.A. panel judging the award. However, I was not one of the final short-listed artists. Later I heard that the panal had thought my work adolescent and immature. The Glen Dimplex award was eventually won - by the American sculptor and filmmaker Mathew Barney. My self-doubts were not allayed by success with the Oisin - in fact they were multiplied.

Despite all of these great boons, this was the start of a severer identity crisis, which robbed me of my self-belief. I did not know if I wanted to, or could conform, to the demands of the Oisin Gallery, the art market or my critics. I created a number of Indian Ink and oil paint works on paper of myself naked being laughed at and pointed at by leering women. With an eye to selling and thus losing my work, I began from 2000-2007 to make various versions of my paintings, often with only minor alterations.

2001 – February 9th – 12th, Helen and myself traveled to Paris for four days. While there, I intensively poured over works in the Louvre, Musee d`Orsay, and the Centre Pompidou. It was in the Centre Pompidou, that I had time to admire the work of Francis Picabia, David Salle and Gerhard Richter. I also saw a thrilling exhibition of Austrian Expressionist paintings and drawings, which included work by Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka.

Then on April 28th - I traveled to Amsterdam with Helen and her two younger sisters - Karen and Amanda - to attend the infamous Queen's birthday celebration. For four days I smoked ridiculous amounts of Marijuana and hashish and took two Ecstasy tablets at a rave in the streets of Amsterdam on the queen's birthday. While in Amsterdam I again visited The Rijksmuseum, The Stedlijk Museum and The Van Gogh Museum. During the year, I drew numerous ink drawings, text pictures and birthing images derived from gynecology manuals. I also painted a new series of Dear Woman works, this time I juxtaposed a long philosophical letter to 'Dear Woman' with a hand painted pornographic image of a woman performing fellatio on a man, in a strong linear realist style, carried out in acrylic paint.

In September Paul O`Kelly the curator of the Oisin Gallery came out to my home to see my new work - he was not impressed. Paul O`Kelly refused to back another exhibition in the Oisin Gallery that year, feeling that I had not "produced a significant enough body of new masterpieces." On October 1st, Helen and I traveled to Cork, where we saw an exhibition of sixty-seven drawings by Picasso spanning the years 1897-1936, which we were very impressed by.

In November, I came up with the idea of recreating my bedroom/ studio in the Oisin Gallery, and living there for a week. I presented my idea to Donal Mc Neela and Paul O`Kelly who enthusiastically backed it.

2002 - I curated Five Day Wonder, my most ambitious and intimate exhibition to date. I recreated my bedroom/studio and livingroom in the Oisin Gallery on Westland Row. I brought in my bedroom carpet, bed, televisions, video players, Hi-Fi, books, video cassettes, and a selection of over three hundred of my paintings and drawings from 1987-2002. I lived, worked and interacted with the public for five days in the Oisin Gallery. Paul O`Kelly and I both wrote essays for a simple black and white catalogue that accompanied the exhibition.

Before the exhibition, I had an interview with Mary Kennedy on Open House on RTE 1. During the week, I was interview by Eamonn Carr for the Evening Herald and Colm Connelly for RTE 1 News. A limited edition of fifteen signed copies of The Panic Texts and The Panic Artist were on sale at the exhibition (none sold and I either gave them away or destroyed them). After the exhibition, I was interviewed by Neil O`Shay on The Arts Show on Lite FM. However compaired to my previous exhibition in the Oisin the art establishment papers now did not even deem me worthy of a review.

Later in the year, I appeared in an interview on the youth program Sampler on R.T.E. 2. Late in the year Emma Betts a third year ceramists in N.C.A.D. wrote her thesis on me; 'The Influences of Contemporary Irish Society and Culture on the Definition of Masculinity, Seen Through the Work of Artist [Cypher].'

Approaching middle age, my outlook became increasingly conservative. I assiduously read the reviews and books of the conservative critic Robert Hughes and took growing influence from old masters like Delacroix, Sargent, Watteau and Holbein. I painted a series of realist watercolours based on photographs of porn-stars and painted my first series of landscapes in nearly twelve years. These works lead to a revival in my work of realist figurative works of often conventional subjects like landscapes, portraits, nudes and still life's, which had none of the graffitied text and abstract over-painting of previous years.

This was in part a concession to the tastes of The Oisin Gallery. I also created a new series of Dear Woman collages which juxtaposed pessimistic letters on life written to womankind with ancient black and white pornographic photographs from the 1890`s -1940`s. At the end of the year I painted an extensive series of watercolour and acrylic paintings of Glendalough and Ireland` Eye (off Howth Co. Dublin) - all of which were painted from photographs I had taken on visits to these scenic areas earlier in the year.

In 2002, I created 139 paintings (91 of them watercolours) and 664 drawings (557 of them in my sketchbooks). By the end of the year my oeuvre included 1,825 paintings (oils, acrylics, watercolours, pastels and collages), 2 sculptures, and 2,212 drawings (3,105 drawings including those in my sketchbooks) and totaled 4,932 works. By now, I had surpassed Picasso at the same age in paintings and drawings. But my victory rang hollow. In art historical terms I had not come even close to matching Picasso`s achievement and I had sacrificed quality and consistency for quantity and confusion.

At the same time I wrote up lists of my favorite artists and ranked them and myself. I put myself at 192 (ahead of George Grosz and behind Winslow Homer - Picasso was at the top of my list) in my list of the all time greatest artists. This was both a vain, gauche and arrogant list to make, but typical of my need to intellectually analyze every aspect of my art and life. From 2002-6 I was strongly influenced by the early juvenilia, academic art, and Neo-Impressionist night-time paintings of Picasso 1890-1901.

2003 - At the start of the year I drew a series of self-portraits and female portrait's in trios crayons on tinted paper - they were clear homage's to the great drawings of Watteau and Boucher. Later I painted a series of graffiti inspired portraits of world champion boxers like Mike Tyson, Roberto Duran, and Muhammad Ali, in which the portraits were juxtaposed with text like; "Fuck Art Dealers," "Fuck Art" and "Fuck The Art World".

Around the same time, I created a series of new photo and text collages, which explored autobiographical issues, pornography and the body. In August, I began attending my third series of formal therapy sessions with the psychotherapist and art therapist Sheila Wilson which Helen paid for.

Artistically I decided to retrain myself in the basics of drawing and painting. I hoped that by rebuilding myself as an artist – I could rediscover myself. That is why my work from 2003-2007 can appear so much like the work of an art student – rather than a fully formed professional. But at their best these works have a telling simplicity - full of a sorrowful talent expressing itself at a time of vital reassessment and consolidation. I also began to work on a portfolio and application to N.C.A.D. First Year Core in January 2004.

In September, I began taking two night classes a week in N.C.A.D. (Helen agreed to pay the e655 needed for the courses), proving I still had a humble desire to learn. The first was 'Art Making' a multimedia class with the painter Anne-Marie Keaveney BA Fine Art, and the sculptor Jackie Duignan BA, MA. The second was 'The Human Figure' a life drawing and painting class with Kenneth Donfield, Dip Fine Art. Both of these classes helped inspire my art practice but it was Kenneth Donfield who made me develop a more painterly approach to my paintings. Kenneth Donfield`s classes were rigorously formal and academic designed to instil in his students a classically grounded mastery of life drawing. Many of the works I did in these classes made up my portfolio for N.C.A.D.

Through out the autumn I produced a couple of dozen highly worked and accomplished, life drawings and paintings, self-portraits, sculpture studies, and nature studies drawn from life. I became more and more concerned by my painting mediums (how different effects could be achieved, with for example - pastel, watercolour, mono-print - of essentially the same subject) and less and less in the subject matter I used.

I also looked intensely at the paintings and drawings of Expressionist masters like; Beckman, Kirchner and Kokoschka. In November I started on a new series of boxing inspired realist drawings and paintings, which had none of the inflammatory text of my earlier boxing paintings. Periodically during the year, I took Ecstasy and Cocaine with Helen at the weekends, as well as smoking lots of hashish.

2004 - I applied to First Year Core in N.C.A.D, and sent in as my application, ten of my best life-drawings, paintings, collages, nature studies, and two twelve page sketchbooks and both my exhibition catalogues. There were 130 places available in First Year Core, and around 750 applications were received, giving me a better than 1 in 5 chance. My application was turned down. I received a score of 485 out of 1,000 and the cut off point was 553. It was without doubt the most humiliating and unjust rejection I had ever received. A few weeks later I was granted an interview to get in on the basis of economic or social hardship. Yet again, my application was rejected. I was an artist who rated himself as the fourth greatest Irish artist, the 210th greatest artist and the 113th greatest draughtsman of all time, yet I could not even get into N.C.A.D.`s First Year Core! The extent of my hubris was cruelly exposed.

On 30th June I traveled for six days to Madrid with Helen. The main reason for our trip to Madrid was to see a retrospective of Julian Schnabel`s in the Palacio de Velazquez, however when I finally saw so many Schnabel`s in the flesh, I found my high opinion of the American dented. Compared to Max Beckman or Jackson Pollock he was just a theatrical, decorative, playboy Expressionists. That said, I still found great beauty in many of his canvases.

While there, I went to the Prado four times, the Renia Sofhia twice and the Thyseen-Bornemisza twice. I was overwhelmed by the Titian`s, Tintertto`s, Bosch`s, El Greco`s, Ribera`s, Velezquez`s and Goya`s in the Prado and I drew from the Titian`s, Goya`s and Ribera`s on two different visits to the great museum. These various Italian, Flemish and Spanish artists struck me as the very summit of western oil painting and western oil painting was to me the very summit of human visual culture.

While in Madrid I drew 15 coloured pencil and marker drawings, filled another note book with notes from the museums and when I returned from Madrid I painted 19 acrylic pallet knife paintings of the parque del reterio in Madrid from memory.

Two weeks after we returned from Madrid, Helen walked out on me. She could no longer live with my laziness, poverty, depression, reclusiveness, and total dependence upon her. I had come to treat her like a doormat, taking from her constantly and giving little in return. She said I was living my dream out, at her expense. I for my part - had found Helen becoming a nagging shrew - unhappy with everything I did and did not do. However I still loved her deeply and was utterly devastated by the break up. Depression robbed me of all my self-confidence, will power and ambition.

Later in the year, I finished with the Oisin Gallery after yet another one of my submissions for an exhibition was rejected. In some ways it is crueller to have success dangled in front of you and then cruelly snatched away. I was marketed and hyped by the Oisin gallery as a kind of celebrity Irish painter, much in the tradition of Mick Mulcahy, Graham Knuttle and later Rasher and Kevin Sharkey. But the curatorial establishment kept their distance and remained unimpressed - the buyers soon disappeared and Oisin's support of my art evaporated.

The shadows cast across my life, which I thought I had dispelled, now returned, as a relentless force, bringing bitterness, darkness and utter hopelessness. I now regarded my artistic achievements, as being in ruins and my life seemed robbed of meaning. Between July and January, I painted only a half-a-dozen art works. Without the emotional and professional support of Helen, hashish and the Oisin gallery, I could not bring myself to work, and the pursuit of art appeared utterly futile. Without the finical support and love of my mother and friendship of Edward Tynan, I really do not think I would have survived these dark months. Late in the year Anthony Peyper helped me build a web-site for my art, it was one of the few positive things to come out of a year that had been my worst in over ten years.

2005 - Early in the year, Helen, told me she could not even be my friend anymore and we no longer spoke or met each other. Two years later Helen had married another man. I was left feeling utterly heartbroken and felt I was living for nothing.

In February supplied with very strong cannabis, I produced a new series of vigorous realist coloured pencil drawings of Irish porn stars, new oil paintings of the parque del reterio in Madrid from photographs and coloured pencil drawings and acrylic self-portrait's from life. My work of 2004-2007 displayed a lighter touch and my subjects were tackled from different angles, in different mediums and inter-linked more significantly than ever before with my other subjects.

In March, I met Carol Stevens, a shy, kooky, graphic designer from Cork on the Internet, and we began a passionate sexual affair, which soon blossomed into a loving committed relationship.

My new relationship gave my life a new sense of optimism and joy. In April, I drew a series of pornographic drawings combined with text, without the crutch of hashish. It was the first time in years I had made art without being stoned and it felt good to be free of my dependency on hashish.

Through out the spring-summer I produced a variety of oil paintings, watercolours and drawings including subjects as diverse as self-portraits, landscapes, portraits, nudes, nightclub scenes and pornographic images. Most of these images were firmly realist in style - and unlike most of my work from 1996-2002 - they were painstaking worked. In mid June, Johnny O`Rielly, of Snapshot Films Ltd. bought the option rights for a film based upon my autobiography; The Panic Artist for e1,400 (the film was never made because Johnny said I was too passive a character, egotistical and a desperate for respect and acceptance). Also in mid June Carol Stevens got a job up in Dublin and moved in to live with me. I began to consciously avoid painting pornographic images or nude self-portraits and instead substituted them with pin-up soft-core nudes, self-portrait heads and landscapes. Meanwhile in mid August I destroyed over 100 of my old paintings and over 500 of my old drawings, which I felt unhappy with.

Using the Internet I sent submissions to art galleries in America, Britain and Ireland, I soon received twenty new rejections and my list of overall rejections reached seventy-seven. Constant rejection and harsh criticism wore me down every day. However the Rosensteel Gallery in Phoenix Arizona did agree to show some of my work, which I Fed-Ex'd over. But nothing sold.

The best exhibition I saw in 2005, was one of lithographs by Paula Rego in Cork, her tough and sensual drawing and painting style greatly impressed me. Towards the end of the year, I produced a number of sunflower still-life paintings, Wet T-Shirt Competition oil paintings, mono-print self-portraits and female nudes. All in all it had been one of my most productive and ambitious years of painting.

2006 - Early in the year I produced a series of Indian ink drawings of female nudes, pastel drawings of women and oil paintings on paper of female nudes. In April I produced a series of crude text and image works on watercolour paper in acrylic, oil paint-stick and coloured pencil in which I juxtaposed images of myself in a straight jacket, of a hang mans noose, and marijuana plants with texts like 'art denied' and 'reject'. I also created works like 'J'Accusse' in which I attacked a list of contemporary art movements.

Also in April I sent a new series of email submissions to art galleries around the world. I received only one reply - a vicious attack on myself, my art and my submission, from a gallery owner in Miami.

Meanwhile Carol and I lived a reclusive life together - we seldom met up with anyone or left the house. However we did venture out occasionally to buy art books - and go to art exhibitions in Dublin. Early in May I completed a series of acrylic and oil paintstick paintings Carol and myself nakedly embracing.

In late June and early July I produced a series of watercolour, acrylic and oil paintings of St. Annes park, (based upon photographs I had taken) which were some of my most crowd-pleasing works to date. My landscapes were notable for their thick pastose surfaces, their tendency towards abstraction, their contrast of natural and man made forms and the complete absence of people.

Late in July I produced a series of 'Girls World' watercolour studies of young women Carol and I had photographed when at gigs and openings. In Late August I went to stay for two days with Carol's parents in Cork - we spent our time going to the various art galleries, buying art books and chilling out in the cafes.

A few days later on the spur of the moment we went to Amsterdam for two days, where we visited the Stedlijk Museum and the Van Gogh museum. At night we got stoned in the coffee-shops looked at the prostitutes in the windows, and visited the various seedy sex shops, porn cinemas, live sex shows, and lapdancing clubs in the Red Light District.

Desperate to sell my paintings, I returned to exhibiting my work in Grogans pub in Dublin, but yet again (after over two months) I had failed to sell anything.

In early October, sick of painting commercial pot-boiler landsacpes - I produced my first series of pornographic drawings and pastels in over ten months. At the end of 2006, I plunged once again into a depressive cycle. Which was illustrated by a new series of conceptual style drawings of objects like; a vile of Amytal Sodium, an ancient sculpture, an oxygen tank, a bell jar, and a blood pouch - which I surrounded with self-critical texts centered around themes of truth, sin and confession.

Late in December I produced two oil pastels, and a black pencil drawing of Carol topless, which I drew from life. During Christmas I drew three black pencil, three brown pencil and one chalk pastel of my mother from life, but my efforts would have embarrassed even a Montmartre street painter.

Overall 2006 (like 2005) had been a year of intensive work for me - with little time spent socializing, taking drugs or drinking.

In 2006 Gustav Klimt’s painting ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ 1907 sold for $137 million, making it the most expensive painting in the world. By the end of the year it had been put into third place by works by De Kooning and Pollock. Such sales were typical of the unprecedented boom in the art market not only internationally but also in Ireland. In fact I lamented that I was one of the few artists in Ireland – not making any money from their art.

2007 - In January fueled by legally bought alternatives to Hashish and 'Ecstasy'- I created a new series of mono-print self-portraits. Half of which - I collaged into a series of acrylic and oilstick paintings – where I placed my mono-printed image alongside text relating to thoughts of; damnation, sin, guilt and shame.

At the start of February - I painted one thickly painted oil painting of Carol and five oil paintings of Lough Cullen Co. Mayo. These paintings of Lough Cullen were based on postcard like photographs I had taken on holiday there. In terms of composition and design – they were simplistic – no better than the happy snaps of an amateur, and the paintings too were conventional and technically unchallenging – typical of my conservative retreat at the time. Then at the end of the month I painted one vulgar oil painting of two women performing fellatio, and two kitsch oil paintings of tulips in a vase.

Later that month, I produced over two dozen Indian ink and watercolour erotic drawings. The original images came from 1970’s porn I found on the internet, but I changed the female stars into women I had a crush on as a teenager and turned the male actor into myself as an eighteen year old. As such these works were more personally erotic than my typical pornographic paintings.

At the end of March, Donal Mc Neela called out to my house to view my new work - he was not impressed and evaded all my requests for an exhibition. When I half-heartedly told him I had thought of giving all my work away for the price of the materials – he jumped on the idea and wanted to stage it. However the following week in a more logical frame of mind and after consulting with others - I discounted the idea. But I was devastated that Donal (one of my few previous supporters) thought that my work in art world terms - was essentially worthless. I was plunged back into further self-doubt and remorse.

I got out of my slump two weeks later by going to the National gallery and making studies from; Titian, Lavery, Romney, Landseer, Van Dongen, Nolde and Chardin - which I later finished off at home. These works were wonderful proofs of my love for other artists.

Meanwhile my interest in other artists swung from a worship of German Expressionists like Kirchner, Nolde, Von Jawlensky, and Heckel – to ‘Belle Epoque’ painters like Sargent, John, Lavery, Sorolla, Orpen, Liebermann, Zorn, Boldini, and Mancini.

Late in April, I went down to Cork with Carol - together we saw ‘The Year of The Pig’ a exhibition of contemporary Chinese art held at The Gluxsman Gallery - which I later panned on my blogs.

In May I produced four quickly made portraits of girls based on photograph’s I had culled from the inter-net. These directly painted oils portraits of girls were both glamorous and anguished images – clearly the product of my twin obsessions at the time – John Singer Sargent’s virtuoso portraits and Vincent van Gogh’s Expressionist portraits. The subdued pallet, and attempts at lighter more fluid brush strokes are evidently influenced by Sargent - but they are at war with my usual thick impastoed surfaces and crude drawing (influenced by van Gogh).

In the first week of June, Carol and I went to see the Lucian Freud retrospective in I.M.M.A. – it was quite simply the best exhibition I had ever seen in Ireland (with the Francis Bacon exhibition in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in 2000 a close second). In mid June I created a series of ‘Hitler’s Son’ drawings – in which I took scenes from my favorite childhood comic – ‘Battle’ and changed the text to refer to Hitler’s failed career as an artist. These works reflected my black, sarcatisic attituted to fame, egotism, artist success and the myths of the ‘Outsider’ battling society and the world.

In mid July I visted Cork again with Carol to see the Gerhard Exhibition in the Glucksman gallery – it was very disappointing, but the holiday overalll was great. Later back in Dublin we saw of beautiful and impressive exhibition of Jack B Yeats paintings on the theme of the Circus.

In September I sold my first painting (‘Art is Dead’, 1998) in over five years – flush with money I painted ten oil or acrylic paintings less than two weeks. The two stand out works were ‘Pregnant Nude’ and ‘Sunset Over I.M.M.A.’ both painted in acrylic on canvas board. However overall I was frustrated by my lack of technical mastery and disapointed by my failure to meet my own high standards. The following month I spent furiously writing and making quick, watercolour and indian ink sketches. At the end of the year – I rewrote and updated my website.

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