Ballagh’s upbringing did its best to dissuade him from art, “my mother was a conservative, middle class person, who would have been skeptical of the arts. Her innate conservatism was bolstered by the fact that one of my cousins, a very good artist, committed suicide. I was only a teenager at the time but this confirmed for her the kind of unsuitability of the artistic professions and that temperament.” Ultimately Ballagh was forbidden from studying art. However, time spent studying architecture had a lasting impact. Or, more accurately, it was having Robin Walker as his tutor, “We were so in awe of Robin […] who had just come back from working with Mies van der Rohe […] who was flushed with enthusiasm for what we now call Classic Modernism.” Walker was one of Ireland’s visionary architects, having also worked alongside Le Corbusier before becoming a founding partner of Scott Tallon Walker, responsible for work like Busáras and translating International Modernism to an Irish context.

Although Ballagh dropped out, Walker’s impression remained, “the important thing for me, because I didn’t practice as an architect, were the attitudes to design and problem solving that Robin introduced, and all those Miesian principles. As a consequence, I am not a spontaneous artist.” As seen in his studio, Ballagh’s pieces are built up from working drawings and tracing paper, an approach echoing his architectural foundation — his finished works have a clarity suggestive of the meticulousness of an architect. Ballagh also attended the ROSC exhibition of 1967, exposing him to the work of American pop artists like Robert Indiana. “I had never seen that kind of work up close — it was so big and so clean. When I looked at it I said, ‘I could do this’”. This pop influence, coupled with an architectural precision, paved the way for Ballagh to arrive at his relatively large scale bold, graphic style. Although, it’s only now that Ballagh says “I’m making the kind of art that I always wanted to but couldn’t make.”

Portraiture recurs throughout Ballagh’s oeuvre. Far from a staid genre, he claims it remains important. Perhaps a consequence of being self taught, Ballagh was immediately free of the canonical constraints of portraiture, allowing him to play with it and its traditional format;  interpreting the genre in his own distinct way. His portraits often contain elements which physically project into the viewer’s space, breaking that barrier between canvas and reality. Despite his own often novel approach to portraiture, he was unimpressed with what he saw at the recent Hennessy Portrait Prize in the National Gallery, stating quite resolutely that he didn’t like it at all. Of the video interpretations he says, “I have no objection, but it has nothing to do with portraiture as far as I’m concerned. I think the general public would be mystified.”

This seems to feed Ballagh’s wider perception of contemporary art. On art’s agency for enacting tangible change he says, “the visual arts have a very narrow influence and unfortunately because of that […] the kind of conceptual approach that has been very dominant for years has been quite alienating for the general public.” Ballagh, wondering aloud, asks how many people who have won the Turner Prize actually make painted pictures, revealing a tension between Ballagh the radicalist and Ballagh the traditionalist. As if to say it’s okay to push boundaries in art, but just not too far, perhaps Ballagh has lost sight of the ground he himself broke as a young artist. “However mad the pictures were, people can understand pictures — they might not like them, they might not get them, but they can understand them. If you think of art in a broader sense I think it can be influential, be it drama, literature or cinema.” But this takes time: “The influence of art has always been like water dripping on a stone — it’s not hugely impactful at the moment. It’s a slow and very gradual thing.”

Although maintaining that the bulk of his work is not overtly political, suggesting that “political art with a capital P can turn people off”, Ballagh the man is utterly so. Artist and critic Brian O’Doherty put it succinctly saying “Robert Ballagh’s art is not a political art but it is an art that is made by a very political person.” His practice has often been directly influenced by politics from campaigns to free the Birmingham Six to Medical Aid for Gaza. It was the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972 which led Ballagh to produce one of his only installation pieces that same year, his response coming about “because the occasion demanded it. I really felt I had to do something, and that’s very rarely happened to me.”

This art of commemoration and remembrance is nothing new to Ballagh, having previously helmed the 75th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Talk turns to next year’s centenary. On his vision for a post-Centenary Ireland, Ballagh struggles, “We’ve ended up in a very difficult position. We’ve sleepwalked into a profoundly undemocratic situation […] and we don’t seem to have the leadership.” On this note, the topic of the government’s support of the arts arises and Ballagh does not hold back, “Ireland has always been bad in this regard. But this particular government has been the worst government for the arts in the history of the state. I believe that to be true.” Cutbacks, reduced opening hours and controversies like last year’s IMMA appointment are microcosmic, he says, of the “abusive […] callous disregard for the arts. It’s bleak.”

Ballagh recalls from his childhood that when visiting the National Gallery, his father would say that he was going to visit “my pictures, our pictures”. Today, however, he worries that such an outlook is under threat, “I shiver when I hear talk about charging people in to see their own pictures.” That the arts are already “hopelessly underfunded to begin with”, to impose cutbacks “is like putting a starving man on a diet.” Even when talking about his infamous portrait of Charlie Haughey, Ballagh muses, “an unusual thing was that he actually liked artists. I get the impression that most of the present crowd don’t like us at all.”

Regardless, Ballagh remains optimistic, “One must always hope. We’ve been fortunate in this country, in spite of everything, to have produced so many wonderful, talented artists, even in the darkest times. This is the irony, artists flower or don’t flower irrespective of funding. You can’t grant-aid a great writer or painter into existence — great art will happen or not happen.”

Photo by Stephen Moloney.