Outline Biography

Warning: The Names of Many Characters in This Work Have Been Changed.

1971-6 - I was born on the 9th February, in the Rotunda hospital Dublin the illegitimate child of a well to do nouveau-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. Although a very disciplined boy - I was also mischievous - loving to make people laugh with my zany sense of humour.

My father was a reclusive grandfather like figure with a head for business but a love for art. He was obsessed with status symbols and the trappings of wealth. My mother was utterly devoted to me, very loving - but also narcissistic, megalomaniacal, domineering, interfering and possessive. I grew up in Tara - a large six-bedroom house on the hill of Howth - overlooking the Irish Sea.

I lived a very privileged childhood, and went to the best schools, was tutored by au-pairs, had piano, elocution, fencing, riding and swimming lessons and I wanted for nothing. I grew up being told that only the best was good enough. Thus when I became a painter - I had to become the greatest. This is why my later failures hurt so much. I had Math’s, Irish, Geography and English grinds from the age of four till the age of fifteen when I had had as much of tutors than I could stomach. With all this relentless ‘hot-housing’ I grew to hate teachers with a passion. I wanted to learn - but on my terms.

1977 - Without warning my father died of a brain haemorrhage. My mother and I were devastated. I was left with an inheritance of two houses - which at the time were valued at over £90,000 (the same properties circa 2008 would be worth about e2,000,000).

After my father’s 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 eighteen months later in 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, Benzodiazepine 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 left penniless and sometimes starved. My mother’s; lies, delusions, paranoia and persecution mania - terrified 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 most gentle and generous person you could hope to meet. She also had a keen intelligence and a hilarious sense of humour.

I was the victim of a ‘parent-centred’ social welfare system that did everything it could to keep children with their mothers - no matter how unfit they were. And a new ‘care-in-the-community’ psychiatric system that dumped mentally ill people back into society - with little or no support - and limited powers of coercion. Yet, even when my relatives suggested committing my mother to a mental hospital for life - I could not agree. I could not abandon my mother no matter how sick and abusive she was.

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 them and became emotionally, intellectually and sexually obsessed with them. I came to worship the female principal - 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. However 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 behaviour, I withdrew introspectively into a rich artistic, sexual and military (wargaming) fantasy life and love for art. Most of my passions were solitary ones; drawing, painting, reading, writing, listening to the radio and watching television. Western art, dominated as it was by dead white male artists, became a substitute father figure for me. I had an omnivorous eye for paintings - I simply could not get enough of them. It remains the same after twenty-nine years. 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, it 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, Indie 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. My oversized ambitions for my art - doomed me - to always feel like a failure. At the age of ten - I began to teach myself how to draw and paint - and I vowed to become an artist when I grew up. This was the start of my ‘self-hypnoses’ (Mic Moroney’s description of me) 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, could see absolutely no meaning to life and I was left feeling hopeless, depressed and lost - as 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 lifelong 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 - My mother was committed to a mental hospital twice during the year. One night in a fit of anger my mother ripped up some of my pastels and threw them in the fire. I did not show my work to her or anyone else for over four years. I did art in school, however this public art - was never my real art - the real art was what I made alone in my bedroom.

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." It was this report that finally convinced my mother that she had a son with an unbreakable vocation for art. From then on - she did everything in her power to support my art financially and practically.

Because my trust fund could no longer pay my school fees, I was taken out of the private Sandford Park Prep school - and moved by my mother into Greendale community school in Kilbarrack. It was situated in one of Dublin’s poorest and roughest neighborhoods’ (featured in the Oscar winning film ‘The Commitments’, 1991 - which was based on the book written by my then Geography teacher Roddy Doyle). I stood out a mile with my privileged background, ‘posh’ accent and gentle manners. I was remorselessly bullied by both boys and girls in Greendale, for over a year. Whatever love I had for schooling was destroyed in less than a year in Greendale.

I began masturbating and fantasizing compulsively. In my fantasies women and girls I knew, would aggressively humiliate me, belittle me, force me to 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 tenth-rate kitsch realist - in his studio in Ballsbridge. As a result, I began to work exclusively in watercolours. 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 Sleep 1886, 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 she 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 father’s 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 idealistic, passionate and skeptical, undisiplined and independent, tormented and enthusiastic, rebellious and conservitive - I loathed stupidity, authority and social injustice.

I spent the long days of summer locked in my bedroom, reading art books, listening to The Smiths and painting and drawing. I bunked out of the normal social interactions with elders, superiors, peers and the opposite sex that help teenagers grow as social beings. I retreated to my bedroom. I would hear the noisy laughs and cries of teenagers my age outside on the street - and it filled me with fear and self-loathing. I had a horror of the flesh, compounded by Catholic guilt and terrors induced by my mother. I feared sin, I feared women - yet I also feared isolation - so I lived conflicted and trapped in my bedroom/studio.

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 Caravaggio and 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.

At the age of fifteen I started buying books on erotic art - from the last three hundred years in particular. In these various books I saw countless, drawings, engravings, watercolours and oil paintings - depicting everything from; masturbation, voyeurism, orgies, sado-masochism, bestiality, sodomy, Tantric Sex, bodily-fluids and even allusions to pedophilia. Most teenagers are surreptitious visitors to sexual depravity - I lived lost in it. I wanted to understand everything about the human animal. The erotic was a zone of fantasy for me - one in which I could manipulate reality to my own liking. At the time - I justified the right for such work to exist by arguing that they were essential documents of the human mind - I still do. However, I feel the debate changes totally when one is dealing with the reality of porn today - with its nasty and abusive edge inflicted on real human beings.

In school, I attended less and less, and everyone knew that I was on the verge of leaving 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!” Locked in my bedroom with only the television and radio to keep me company I dreamt of artistic glory, acceptance, forgiveness and reward. In my house I created a perfect fantasy world - in which I was painting in competition against; Renoir, Degas, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Ingres, Schiele and Picasso. I lived like an invalid recluse, dressed like a dandy and already saw my work as very anti art-world. In 1987, I also switched from student paints and papers to the highest quality artists paints and watercolour papers - which cost over twice the price.

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 - it was the first of many rejections. 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. My grandiose ambition demanded a life of solitude and I abandoned what few friends I had.

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 Decadent and narcissistic watercolour self-portraits and pubescent anguished nudes of Egon Schiele. The Austrian’s work convinced me that erotic art could be as heroic and compulsive as religious or history paintings - so I determined to put the human body at the centre of my art. That year I produced my first self-portraits, including a pair of images of myself as a transsexual - which documented my gender confusion. Meanwhile I collected books on erotic art and photography. In late 1987, I had my first formal therapy sessions with a councillor, the main subject of which was the difficulties I had 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. However, I rarely attended - and when I did - I spoke to no body, read my own books and ignored the most of the teachers.

The work I produced between March 1988 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 most difficult of my career. During the year, I painted such photo derived realist alkyd paintings as; Country Road, Vogue Model, Girl with Leg Raised and Large Nude. Meanwhile I became obsessed with the monstrous productivity of Pablo Picasso. His 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. From 1986-1990 the colour black dominated my life, thoughts and dress. I adored painting women in black dresses - but I loved to paint women in black stockings even more.

My paintings from 1988-1995 were most diverse in character. 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.

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 undeniable 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 each year were granted such irregular entries without any qualifications.

Part of my portfolio included the medium scale, linear (overly hard) shaded pencil drawings; Self-Portrait with My Mother in Florida, 1980, St. Theresa in Ecstasy (After Bernini) and 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 the Rear.

One of the greatest contradictions of my personality was between my shy introverted character and my rebellious and extrovert art works. Painting was my refuge from my mother’s demonic personality and an expression of my inner state of mind. By painting my deepest fears - I hoped to confront them and overcome them. I not only manically thought I was a genius - I also thought that virtually every other artist of my day was utter rubbish.

In April, I visited Los Angles with my mother, for two weeks. While there I visited all of the city’s major art Museums and also travelled with my mother to Las Vegas for the weekend, while there I bought my first hard-core pornographic magazines. Since Ireland had the strictest censorship laws in the western world - I had to smuggle this contraband into the Irish Republic. They later 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 cringed when I saw women my age or older triumph in school, college, sport, business, media and love - while I had no qualifications to my name, could not drive a car and was unemployed and unemployable. Added to this I was fearful of modern women's demands to be sexually satisfied. In real life aggressive girls never mind swingers and female deviants filled me with dread - 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, willing, obedient and enthralled by men. In real life women sent me into a panic attack if they sat beside me, tossed their hair or smiled at me - never mind spoke to me! But in porn I was in control - in porn-land I was a stud. So through pornography, I was able to pursue my obsession with women at a safe distance.

Just like drugs, pornography provided me with a quick fix, and a masturbatory universe I could lose myself. Pornography also suited my voyeuristic and intellectual nature and need for safety and solitude. So 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, good looking, confident, wealthy or socially connected men - but not with a timid and depressed art nerd like me.

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 college) 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. It is typical of my teenage desire to make a blunt point. 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 refused painting - because of my dismal attendance record. After only a year, I was expelled having failed my first year assessment. However, my stay does reveal one insight preserved in my archive - my exam results from my first three months in Dun Laoghaire. In painting I got a C, in drawing another C, in sculpture a D and in art history an E! These are not the results of a prodigy never mind a gifted artist of note and considering my later encyclopaedic knowledge of art history my 'E' for an essay on Picasso`s Les Demoiselles d`Avignon is astonishing. Yet at the time these results were nothing better than I deserved. I was not a star pupil and while I struggled - other students received distinctions in drawing, painting and sculpture. I did not cope well in the academic environment. Although I knew - it would take me twice as long to learn the skills of painting and drawing alone - my stubbornness forced me back into isolation.

I took my expulsion as a blessing, for from that moment on I was free to pursue - without interference - my own very private relationship to art. Having left college, I vowed to pursue my art career full time. However, I was shy and self-loathing, I had limited energy, lacked confidence, never left my bedroom 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, Anselm Kiefer, Francisco Clemente, Sigmar Polke and David Salle. Between 1990-91 I saw a number of exhibitions in Dublin featuring work by German Neo-Expressionist painters like; 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 my own expressionist painting even more intensely.

Late in the year, I started to go out every weekend to Mc Gonagles alternative rock nightclub on South Anne Street. I had spent my life trying to avoid real sex with real women as long as possible. It was only in late 1990 when driven mad with loneliness and lust I started going to Mc Gonagles. Crippled with shyness I would sit all night on my own or aggressively dance amongst the revellers. 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 Gonagles 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.

From 1990, as I worked faster and faster (within the small confines of my bedroom), I increasingly painted in the unusual medium of acrylic on paper - an economical and quick drying alterative to alkyd or oils on Canvas. Occasionally in works like ‘Mother Eating Child’ 1990 - I mixed acrylic paint with sand. However this experiment with mixing sand into my paint was not one I developed much further - perhaps out of fear for the ultimate permanency of the finished work.

Art was my escape route from pain. I made art to distract me from my anguish. Sometimes painting was like an exorcism - pulling out all my demons and making them visible to the light of day. Sometimes art was like a game - I pursued for reasons I could not really articulate. Sometimes art was a form of combat against a world I found corrupt and deceitful. Sometime art was a joy that connected me to humanity. Sometimes art felt like a curse put on me by the Gods for reasons I did not fully know. I hated the thought of making art - that could be mindlessly enjoyed by the bourgeois.

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. I was in youthful rebellion against the hypocrisy and lies of Irish society. My work was frankly dystopian, pessimistic and fatalistic. I was convinced of my genius so I took my continuous failures as solid proof of it.

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. I painted on Arches watercolour paper or on over-sized unstretched French linen - which I pinned to the wall or lay flat on the ground. Sometimes I painted on French linen mounted on canvas-board. Each one of my canvases now was a confession, a scream and a protest against the cruelty of life. I began to paint in an ad-hoc instinctive manner and placed huge value on inspired accident. 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. For all the apparent abandon of these works - they also contained the traces of my repression and disgust with the sensual. They expressed my uncomfortably contained emotions and my attempt to free them in paint. That is why the actual paint asserted itself crudely as often more memorable than the image itself. My explosive paintings became containers for my pain and were notable for their self-hatred, self-pity and anger towards the world.

I painted expressionist/realist masterpieces like Self-portrait with Clenched Fist, Self-Portrait Screaming in Blue, Self-Portrait Wasting Away and Inferno. There was an opaque and self-contained quality to my brushwork use of thick paint in these paintings. They were often dominated by a single colour - and were a cry for help from a world that would not listen. The self-centred pain and melodrama of these paintings make them difficult for most to appreciate - though amongst my fans they have a cult following. 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 Centre.

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. 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.

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. 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.

In April, I also started collaging pages from the porn magazines - I had bought in LA in 1989 - directly into paintings like Terror Nude and Auto-Destruction. Collages I knew all too well would not last as long as paintings. But their brutal reality demanded I use them in my provocative art. I tried my best though - to use working methods that would give the work as long a life as possible. I chose my collaged elements with care. I used only photographic material printed on high quality paper (ironically some porn is printed on very high quality paper). All items were collaged with either acrylic paint or PVA glue onto acid free watercolour paper of some description. From 1995, if I needed images or text from less stable and durable papers like newsprint - I would photocopy the pages onto artist quality pastel papers like Cason or Ingres. Finally from 2002 - I varnished all fragile photo-collaged elements with Liquatex acrylic matt varnish which had UV protection.

By August, even I had to admit I had a problem. In secret, I attended a psychiatrist and was put on Prozac. 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.

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).

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. This entry from my St. Ita`s medical files, written on the 1st January 1992, is interesting for the final direct quote which chillingly relates my sense of despair at the time and my belief in myself as a cipher: “I am nobody. I have no name. I cut my wrists to see blood.” Thanks to my psychiatric incarceration, we are in the fortunate position of being able to give me a psychiatric diagnosis. In my psychiatric files of 1991-1995, I was diagnosed as; dangerously impulsive, with a tendency towards intellectualization, depressed, pre-psychotic, passive-aggressive, highly dependent, but time and again I was described as suffering from a Borderline Personality Disorder.

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. 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 utterly meaningless - and I was plagued by sexual shame.

During my first admittance to St Ita`s - I was given 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 Prelude and Quenched Skin.

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 (which is now three volumes long) became the standard I aspired towards in my own writing. It was typical of my grandiosity that I presumed that my life deserved as long a text as that which Richardson wrote on Picasso - the largest biography on any visual artist. I also read numerous feminist texts, sex surveys, and erotic authors like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. After Christmas I had to commit my mother to St. Ita's again and distraught I attempted suicide twice in the space of two days - 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. For many viewers my more tongue in cheek sexual paintings like Big Swinging Mickey (in which a male stripper masturbates naked in front of a crowd of women) were easier to relate to - as they were more whimsical and light-hearted. But my other work from this period was so aggressive and in your face - that most people could not relate to me as an artist or 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.

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 artist’s 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 modelling in clay from the life-model with Pat Fortune. Social interaction in Art College was agony for me and I talked to no one. My hero of life-painting was Lucien Freud whose work I looked at intently and I learnt greatly from it.

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, and February 1995) - having sex; seventy times with thirty-nine different women. However after two weeks in Amsterdam - I had still failed to have an orgasm with a single woman. My difficulties in relaxing, enjoying myself and having an orgasam with prostitues was a further proof of my troubled and self-loathing sexuality. It was only on my second trip that I finaly came with a prostitute. 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.

From July until December 1992 - I had a large studio in Dun Laoghaire. I hated it. I felt even more alone and uncomfortable. Looking back now I can see it was a result of my agoraphobia. I had no desire or capacity to make any friends with the other artists.

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 one of my heroes at the time in the Stedilijk. While on my trips to Amsterdam I produced a number of drawings related to the red light district.

1992-2008 - 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. In many of my paintings I collaged hand written blow-by-blow accounts of my visits with prostitutes in Amsterdam.

From 1992 - I took words from art texts, philosophy books, feminist studies and transgressive theories - which I spontaneously picked out and then wrote onto my paintings. Transplanting these academic words from their original theoretical context - gave them a strange impenetrable insanity.

There was nothing new about my production of text paintings - other artists from the early 1970’s onwards like; Joseph Beuys, Jorg Immendorfff, A.R. Penck, Basquiat and Sean Landers - had made such work central to their art. However, the difference between my text paintings and theirs was the naive, unself-conscious insanity and locked-in intensity of my text work.

In these mad word paintings - I was revealing my inner existence; my illness, my medications, my fears, and my ambitions - with no thought for my own privacy or dignity. The viewer looking at the paintings were eavesdropping on my locked-in monologue. However, most in the art world were to find these works incomprehensible, insane, juvenile and galling.

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 I 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 psychotic abstract interjections.

1992-2008 - A child of the chemical generation, I began my extensive derangement of the senses, becoming a habitual user of Hashish and Amyl-Nitrate 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. I used drugs because they gave me confidence in myself as an artist - when I had lost all faith in myself - or hope for the future.

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 a confrontational quality - which attracted me. However since their work was mostly conceptual or sculptural it had little 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 - I had little interest, respect or empathy with art from the 1960’s-2008. I hated most; conceptual, video, photographic, performance, installation, feminist, gay, protest and nationalist art - with a vengeance. 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 since 1987. 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 large-scale realist and expressionist works as; Librium, Sodium Amytal, The Trauma of The Voyeur, The Trauma Unit and The Three Sisters. My pornographic paintings like Sodium Amytal - were painted with great care and technical sophistication - a total rebuke to those who would dismiss them as merely adolescent, puerile and 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. Later in the week distraught by my failure to get into college - I 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 had an orgasm with these men and never committed sodomy. Moreover, I never fantasized about gay sex 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 him I met the journalist Robert Fagan and through him; the journalist Mic Moroney, and through him 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 - all he got was abuse from dealers. 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; The Trauma Unit 1993, The Three Sisters 1993, The Force of The Womb 1994, Antigone 1993, Oxygenate 1993. It was a minor show with no opening, no press reviews and no sales. It had been planed that I would have a major one-man show in The Head Gallery later in the year - but after I snubbed the curator in a private club my big show was cancelled.

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 narcissism. My prose, poetry, art theory and rants were projections of my monstrously enlarged left-wing Nietzsche and nihilistic vision of existence. What I 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 life in blunt almost autistic terms. In these early versions of The Panic Texts - I wrote about myself as though I was the only Irish artist that mattered - in fact as though I was the only artist in the world that mattered.

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 sleep with women.
1995 - In January, I acquired my final inheritance, a house in Clontarf - which I sold for £55,000 (money I used for art materials and travel) - and my family home - which I moved back into with my mother. In February, I spent nine days in Amsterdam with Edward, where 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. In 1995, I was forced to compromise and buy cotton duck canvases as well as my normal French Linen canvases. 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 ‘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 even 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. While I felt elated for a few days afterwards - the following weeks were hell. I came to hate having one night stands. I always hoped the girl would fall in love with me - but few of them did. I was looking for acceptance, love and desirability. However, I ended up feeling unloved, used, melancholy and more alone than ever. At the time I also read and reread 'Parallel Visions' the catalogue to a major exhibition of outsider art and 'Anti-Oedipus' by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 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 idols bold and powerful canvases.

 I began to produce a series of traced pornographic ink drawings with cartoon speech bubbles. At first the dialogue in these drawings was 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. However it was notable how little conviction, feeling or sensuality these works possessed. They were typical of many of my text-based works - which were controversial because of their technical simplicity and simple 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 young adult life. Helen who was a nurse - became my lover, best friend, surrogate mother, cook, secretary - and later 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. This 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 'Artifacts of a Crisis,' at The Garden of Delights. I exhibited sixty-four paintings and drawings including works like; Self-Portrait Screaming in Blue 1991, The Dominance of Consumption 1994, False Dawn 1995, and pornographic canvases like; Librium 1993, Amylnitrate 1993 and The Birth of Crime 1996. 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 artists’ talk in the bookshop. However yet again I failed to sell a single painting.

Between the end of 1996 and the end of 2002 - my mother had to be committed to a mental hospital numerous times - sending my life into chaos. She absolutely hated Helen and made things very difficult for us. The loneliest walks of my life were to and from, St. Vincent’s Psychiatric hospital in Fairview to visit her. Time and again, she would promise to take her medication and make a life for herself - time and time again she lied.

1997 - During the year I had another one-man exhibition in The Globe Bar on Georges Street where I showed eight paintings and I also showed a couple of works 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 Arches 300lb 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. There was none of the vast well-spring of humanity one finds in artists like Goya - even when he is dealing with horrific subjects.

In July, I visited London with Helen for three days and had my 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 meagreness of these works was a reflection of my shortage of money and art materials. 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 2005 - 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 World War Two war maps - I found in magazines 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 gestural abstract shapes. My War Map paintings were expressions of impotent power by a social outcast and recluse. 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, the Marquis de Sade and Schopenhauer.

1998-2000 - By the end of 1997, painting was very much a secondary vocation to my growing concern with 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.
At the end of February, Helen Black off her own bat - catalogued the vast oeuvre of paintings and drawings I had accumulated over the previous eleven years. She documented 2, 732 works produced from Jan 1987 - Feb 1998, not including my sketchbooks.

I was filled with disenchantment - weighed down by my rejections. 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.
Then I began painting the first of my Unitary paintings, which started with works like Failure of Nerve, and Art is Fucking Worthless in 1998 and culminated with works like Anal Abstraction in 2000. These were 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 overall 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 as well as 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 work. 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 it too 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. I went to most exhibitions in Dublin - only to pour scorn.

1999 - I visited Barcelona, Helen, 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 but some hurt more than others. 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 and yBa 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 dining-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. My favourite drawing medium at this time was Indian ink and sable brush.

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 dependency on her and my failure to make enough effort to push my art career. However, within seven months we had reunited. In the meantime, I casually dated an Irish girl and a German girl. 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 the Oisin 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.

In July I painted ‘Noose’ - an Indian ink drawing of my face - traced from a video - in front of which I painted in acrylics a hangman’s noose. It marked a new melodramatic low in my art. For years I wondered why I had painted this work just when I was achieving success. I realize now, that I was actually terrified of success - and the fame, publicity and scrutiny it entailed.

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.’ She was not impressed! 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. It was called Twenty Years of Panic Art - because Paul had dated the birth of my Panic Art to my decision to become an artist at the age of ten. 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, Ian O`Doherty and Helen Murray. 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 Irish singer Gavin Friday (once the lead-signer of The Virgin Prunes) - for the Glen Dimplex Award. Gavin 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 panel had thought my work adolescent and immature. The Glen Dimplex award - was eventually won - by the American sculptor and filmmaker Mathew Barney.
Success had kept me waiting a long time - so when it came I was thrown into mental confusion. My self-doubts were not allayed by my show 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.

Meanwhile I created a number of Indian ink and oil paint works on paper of myself naked being laughed at and pointed at by leering, semi-naked and drunken women. With an eye to selling and thus losing my work, I began from 2000-2008 to make various versions of my paintings, often with only minor alterations.

2001 - February 9th - 12th, Helen and I travelled 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 in the Maillol museum - which included mind-blowing masterpieces by Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Then on April 28th - I travelled to Amsterdam with Helen and her two younger sisters - Karen and Amanda - to attend the infamous Queen's birthday celebrations. 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 also again visited The Rijksmuseum, The Stedelijk Museum and The Van Gogh Museum.

During the year, I drew numerous ink drawings, text pictures and birthing images derived from gynaecology manuals. I also painted a new series of Dear Woman works - this time I juxtaposed a long philosophical letter to 'Woman' with a hand painted pornographic image of a woman performing fellatio on a man - carried out in acrylic paint in a strong linear realist style similar to Van Gogh. These painting were almost hallucinatory in their crude realism. Each pornographic insert took me weeks of slow over-painting. A task made even more difficult because of the special short-comings of Acrylic - which lacks the translucency of oils, dries too quick to allow subtle modelling - and when dry is at least two tones darker than when wet. My style was Cezanne filtered through Freud and distorted by drugs.
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 and thought my drug taking was effecting the quality of my work. He refused to back another exhibition in the Oisin Gallery that year, saying that I had not: "produced a significant enough body of new masterpieces."

On October 1st, Helen and I travelled to Cork, where we saw an exhibition of sixty-seven drawings by Picasso spanning the years 1897-1936, which we were very impressed and inspired 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 living-room 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 which I hung unframed on the walls or stored in portfolios. 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 show. It was a sales disaster (I knew it would be so did the Oisin) - I sold only about six works and both the gallery and I took a big loss.

Before the exhibition, I had a nine-minute live 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 compared 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 wanted to move on artistically but had nowhere to go. My hollow self-centeredness had caught up with me. 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. Most of these watercolours remained too close to their photographic sources to have any lasting interest.

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. At first I made these works in order to have saleable works but I soon became enthralled by the new challenges of the landscape. Moreover, I felt that they where self-portraits in another form.

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 totalled 4, 932 works. By now, I had surpassed Picasso at the same age in paintings and drawings. But my victory rang hollow. Technically my work plumed depths of incompetence unseen in Picasso’s early work and failed to reach the heights of the Spaniard at his best. 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 favourite artists and ranked them and myself. 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. As the years progressed my raking of myself went down and down. 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 Jean-Antoine Watteau and Francois 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 The 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. The confused this-and-that range of subjects and uneven quality of the finished works at this time betrayed my loss of focus and confidence in my vision.

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 2003-2008 can appear so much like the work of an art student - rather than a fully formed professional. However, 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 application for my N.C.A.D. in 2004.

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 - My work of 2004-2008 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.
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 one of the top five greatest Irish artists 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 travelled 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, Tintoretto’s, Bosch`s, El Greco`s, Ribera`s, Velazquez’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 notebook 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 harder 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. At the time I went along with it out of desperation to change my fate - but now I often feel ashamed of my television appearances. But the public never took to me, the curatorial establishment kept their distance - the buyers soon disappeared and Oisin's support of my art soon 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 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 support of Helen, Hashish and the professional commitment of the Oisin Gallery - I could not bring myself to work. Without the financial 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 Pyper helped me build a website 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 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.
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 I had taken with Helen), coloured pencil drawings and acrylic self-portrait's from life.

In March, on the inter-net dating site Faceparty - I met Carol Stevens, a shy, eccentric and quirky twenty-six year old graphic designer and Vector Illustrator from Cork. We began a passionate sexual affair -which soon blossomed into a loving committed relationship. Carol had a natural love for art I had rarely seen. She loved Pop art, kitsch, Hello-Kitty, Dita Von Tease, burlesque and The Suicide Girls all of which she taught me about - and I used many of these influences in my work later that year in homage to Carol. In fact, Carol became my most painted friend or girlfriend inspiring many works.
My new relationship gave my life a new sense of optimism and joy. In April, I made 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 (briefly) of my dependency.

Throughout 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, egotistical and 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, printing 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. From late 2005 - I began to fanatically read Brian Sewell’s weekly art reviews on The London Evening Standard website. It was the hundreds of reviews by Sewell that I read on-line that convinced me - he was the funniest, most original and most provocative art critic writing in English. While Robert Hughes had abandoned weekly journalism and the battle with the young tyros of the art world - Sewell continued to pour ridicule up the largely useless exhibitions of contemporary art.

In the last week of November I wrote my first art Blog and I quickly became addicted to giving my opinion on Irish exhibitions, art world stars, old masters and anything else art related which caught my eye.

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. These were old-fashioned, old-school paintings - made with conventional materials to express basic sentiments.

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 melodramatically juxtaposed images of a straight jacket, hang-mans noose, or 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 who said I was laughably self-important, five bad painters in one, that my use of porn was passé, that I suffered from persecution mania, and that stylistically I was an artist with a multi-personality disorder. Of course he was right - but then that was the whole point of my work!

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 paint stick paintings of 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 manmade forms and the complete absence of people. They were also utterly irrelevant in art historical terms, but by then I could not care less for the art world.
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 lap-dancing 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 landscapes - 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 centred around themes of truth, sin and confession. It was typical of me to turn an emotional breakdown - into a laconic conceptual game. Late in December, I produced two oil pastels, and a black pencil drawing of Carol topless, which I drew from life. Later 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.

Meanwhile in the art world 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. Irish art had never been more fashionable or sought after by both local and international collectors - so I lamented that I was one of the few artists in Ireland - not making any money from their art.

Nevertheless 2006 (like 2005) had been a year of intensive work for me - with little time spent socializing, taking drugs or drinking. I created now like a man with nothing to lose and absolutely nothing to gain - simply for my own pleasure, stimulation and amusement.

2007 - In January - fuelled by legally bought alternatives to Hashish and Ecstasy - I created a new series of mono-print self-portraits. Half of them I collaged into a series of acrylic and oil-stick paintings - where I placed my mono-printed portrait - alongside text relating to thoughts of; sin, guilt, shame and damnation. If fact from 2007, I began to undergo what can only be described as a spiritual crisis. Even though I was an atheist, I desperately sought spiritual meaning in an existence I thought was unjust, cruel, absurd and pointless. I began to revisit my Catholic heritage to find symbols I could use in my art as a form of quest.

At the start of February - I painted one thickly painted oil painting of Carol and five of Lough Cullen in Co. Mayo. The paintings of Lough Cullen were based upon - 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 on cheep Cotman watercolour paper which was my only choice - at a time when I could not afford expensive oil paints and canvas boards. 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 proof of my love for other painters and my desperation to learn from them. 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’ an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art held at The Gluxsman Gallery - which I later panned on my Blogs. In May, I produced four rapidly painted portraits of girls - based on photograph’s I had culled from the inter-net. These directly painted oils portraits were both glamorous and anguished images - clearly the product of my twin obsessions at the time - the virtuoso portraits of John Singer Sargent and the Expressionist portraits of van Gogh. The subdued pallet, and attempts at lighter more fluid brush strokes were influenced by Sargent - but they were at war with my usual thick impastoed surfaces and crude linear 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 Richter 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 The National Gallery. In September I sold my first painting (Art is Dead 1998) in over five years - bought by Stephen Bowman who soon became my best friend and greatest supporter. Flush with money I painted ten oil and acrylic paintings in 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. These paintings were less surprising for their boldness than for their respect for tradition and maturity. However overall I was frustrated by my lack of technical mastery and disapointed by my failure to meet my own high standards. That month Carol started in First Year Core in N.C.A.D. - I thought I would be jealouse of her - in a way I was. However when I heard what kinds of things she was doing in Core I realised I had been better off not getting in - it simply would not have suited me. Maybe I would have been better off applying to second year painting - but even then I doubt I could have submited myself to the critique, routine or disipline of collage. But when Carol came home everynight and told me what she had learnt or the new skill she had developed - I was delighted for her. In a way I had the best of N.C.A.D. without the chore of attending!

The following month I spent furiously writing and making quick, watercolour and indian ink sketches. Carol’s mother had generously bought us a studio easel and so for the first time in years - I began painting at an easel - rather than on the floor. I began tentativly exploring my childhood in paintings made from memory or my old family photographs. Making these works I was doing more than making pictures - I was reconecting myself with a period in my life I had tried so hard to avoid dealing with directly in paint.

At the end of November I produced a number of quick collages which included some of my rejection letters from art galleries which I juxtaposed with photographs of myself naked with pages from wargaming magazines and self abusing graffitti. Making these cathratic works took a lot out of me and I was very depressed after their compeltion. Then in the first week of December I sold my second work (Oedipal Eye a text based drawing from 1993) to Stephen Bowman for e550.

At the end of the year I read books on Lovis Corinth which I had got in the N.C.A.D. library - I was deeply impressed by his extreemly varied oeuvre which had progressed from academic studies, to Fin de Sicele figure compositions, to Post-Impressionits canvases and eventually to an agitated and profound form of early Expressionism. I was shocked that this artist whose work I was only dimily familure with could be so similar to my own approach to art by the age of thirty-six.

Before Christmas I produced a flurry of quickly created collaged paintings with the rejection letters I had accumlated from art colleges and galleries in the past ten years. I found their production unexpectadly heart breaking and depressing - but I felt compled to purge them from my life through the cathartic process of painting.

2008 - In the first week of January I avidly read a rare copy of Brian Sewell’s: The Reviews That Caused The Rumpus and other pieces (1994) - which I bought on the internet. It was a masterpice of contemptious, politically-incorrect, provocitive, superbly written and researched art critism. Sewell practially hated every modern artist and attacked every single flaw in their craft, technique, style, charcter, life and promotion. So naturally I loved him! Also in the first week of 2008, I received my 91st rejection - this time from Jack Rutberg in Los Angles.

In mid January I painted eighteen acrylic paintings in one week - as well as writing an eight page blog on my hero Richard Gerstl. Meanwhile online I gorged on the archive of the New York Times - reading hundreds of reviews of Neo-Expressionist artists. The deadpan, liberal sarcasm of the New York Times writers entertained me no end. In conjunction with this I downloaded hundreds of images of Neo-Expressionist paintings, drawings and sculptures from the 1980’s.

In the first week of February Stephen Bowman bought a third work from me - this time Portrait of A Girl, 1990 - a realist pencil drawing I had made from the tevelvision screen - for e550. By now Steve had become like a younger brother to me - I had found my Theo. Later that week on Friday 8th of Febraury I attended the showing of The Diving Bell and The Butterfly 2007, the third film by my hero Julian Schnabel. After the show Schanbel gave a talk and I got him to sign my battered copy of his auto-biography CVJ (1987). However I was too chronically shy to say anything meaningful to him except “I fucking love your work! You’re a hero to me!” “Gosh Thanks.” He replied.

At the end of the second week of February - I painted a couple of eye-popping, halucinatory paintings in acidic colours - the first of a girl drinking beer and showing her breasts at Mardis Gras and the second of a girl jerking off a man. The toxic colour combination - of black, dark purple, burnt red and lemon yellow should not have worked - but in fact did. It is clear these were paintings were all knocked off in a long night. The loud compositions and extra-strong colours of these works - reflected my brightening mood as spring dawned.

In the second week of Febraury I commensed and new cycle of acrylic paintings and collages - this time based on images of The Temple of The Golden Pavalion in Kyoto Japan. The images came from a small catalogue I had once bought on the temple - but I sought to marry them to my memories of Yokio Mishima’s novel The Temple of The Golden Pavilion. Yet again artists like Twombley and Schnabel were touch stones for me in these works. The predominate use of pink spray-paint was yet another small homage to my beloved Carol - who was also using pink in her works in N.C.A.D.

Near the end of February I painted a series of Map-Paintings - in which I explored the nature of my; solipsism, narcissism, and egotism. However the masterpiece of these map paintings; Solar Venus - had nothing to do with me - it was a surrealist, hallucination of a monstrous female figure created out of blotted bright red paint over a map of the solar system.

On Saturday morning on the 16th March, Carol woke me up in my sleep to tell me I was featured in Hot Press magazine (Ireland’s version of Rolling Stone magazine) - on their ‘Sexed Up’ page by their resident sex columnist Anne Sexton. I thought it was great - but quickly fell back to sleep.

Late in March I painted a haulcinatory, realist, painting of Carol dressed up as a clown, with a female friend at an N.C.A.D. fancy dress party - which we had attended the previous September. It was based on a digital photograph I had taken at the party. I painted the picture in acrylic paints in one twelve-hour sitting, fuelled by Red Bulls, Mocha’s, cigarettes and numerious joints. Its deeply saturated, dark, colours - were in keeping with my taste at the time.

I also completed a new series of painted collages featuring over-painted and thus self-censored pornographic magazine pages. Which I contrasted with images from western art - and nude snap-shots - I had taken of myself naked in my bedroom/studio - in the late 1990’s. Moreover I painted three roughly-painted - but painterly, dark, acrylic nudes and another portrait of Carol this time in profile with the words “Ma Joile” written alongside her (a nod to Picasso). These works are provocative and contradictory - occult but self-revealing.

In April I sold my fourh painting to Stephen Bowman for e550. Then I made my first online sale to Mr Garth Pye in Southern Austraila for my oil painting Girl Taking Off Bra’ (2007) for e1, 000. I found my newfound good luck disconcerting but pleasurable, and such sales helped fund my manic painting.

In the second week of April - I painted four of my most ambitious paintings in over ten years. Started off as quick Fauvist inspired acrylic paintings they became labour intensive works with a trippy sense of line and colour. They were influenced by the sensual, evil looking femme fatales of Kees Van Dongen.

At the end of the week, I painted a quick series of new word paintings and paintings of imaginary sculptures. Yet again, I prized raw impact - over refinement and complexity. The psychic spontaneity of these works - their manic, prophetic and mature voice - made them some of my best work in a decade. However, paintings like this could have struck others as grandiose - and desperate to prove to others how clever I was.

The following week I created a new series of crazy collages in which I contrasted images of German Expressionist paintings with ‘wargaming’ photographs of World War One German tanks and soldiers, alongside snap-shots of myself - all against splashy backgrounds of Cobalt blue. In my stoned, caffeine fuelled nights of non-stop painting and collaging - I strove to achieve an almost automatic approach to painting - that communed me with supernatural forces.

Between the second week of January and last week of April (103 days) - I had created 91 acrylic paintings and painted collages as well as two Indian ink drawings. However, the combination of over-work, fatigue and my abuse of herbal cannabis and extacsy tablets - had pushed my mental condition over the edge. On Friday 2ed May, I had a complete melt-down. I was convinced that I had cancer and my mother phoned the 24-hour doctors-on-call service - who called an ambulance for me. When the ambulence arrived and the driver began quirring why I mertied an ambulence to the hospital - I told him to get the fuck out of my house. He tried to goad me into a physical fight - but for once I had more sense than to be baited. However, I had to go out to St. Ita’s mental hospital for assesment. I was interviewed and allowed to go home with a week supply of 250mg Xanax tablets (which I had to take twice a day for a week) to help calm me down and deal with my anxiety.

The following month I was shell-shocked and fearful of resuming intense painting - lest I lapse again. I spent my time reading books on German Neo-Expressionist painters and Berlin art galleries. In the last week of May, I painted six very intense, psychotic looking self-portraits of myself against writhing backgrounds of red and yellow. In these therapeutic canvases - I purged myself of all my pent up anger, fear and mental collapse. These works were an insane mixture of Old Masterish lighting, Expressionistic colour, and graphic use of black. I did not give a dam if anyone liked them - or if they were saleable - they were simply paintings I had to make.

In the Second week of June, I visited Berlin with Carol for six days. It was quite simply the best holiday I had had since Barcelona in 1999. In Berlin we visited the Hamburger Bahnhof museum of contemporary art where I was stunned by the historical density and profundity of the Anselm Kiefer’s, the iconic staying power of Warhol, the spiritual magic of Beuys and the trippy painterliness of Daniel Richter. However, I was disappointed by the dry emptiness of the Twombly paintings on view. The following day we visited The Pergamon Museum. Which was quite simply - the greatest collection of sculptures - I had ever seen. These master craftsmen and genius carvers made me feel ashamed to call myself an artist. In The Pergamon Museum we also saw an awe-inspiring collection of Islamic art from Turkey - which we were very impressed by.

The same could not be said for the ‘cutting-edge’ art on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie - as part of the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art. I wondered at a world that thought these artists important and me an irrelevancy. Then Carol and I were devastated when we then heard that the Neue Nationalgalerie’s permanent collection - which we had only paid in to see - was closed!

The next day we visited the Gemaldegalerie - where I was heartbroken with envy at the painterly skills of (in order of my preference for the paintings on show at the time); Rembrandt, Hans Holbein The Younger, Petrus Christus, Lucas Cranach The Elder, Jan Vermeer, Albrecht Durer, Sandro Botticelli, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Caravaggio, Sir Anthony Van Dyke - and a host of ‘minor’ painters whose technique made me look like a painterly retard. The following day we revisited the Gemaldegalerie for another quick reviewing of our favourite paintings.

At the end of that evening, we visited the Filmmuseum of Berlin in the space-age Sony Centre. Carol and I were delighted and enthralled, by its state-of-the-art multimedia presentation of German film and television. In the film section, we were first excited by; the films, story-boards, documentation, and mock ups for the Expressionist inspired Dr Caligari and the futuristic and prophetic Metropolis. The next highlight was the iconic Marlene Dietrich rooms. Finally, at the end of the film section we saw the very emotional, mortuary-style rooms - dealing with the radioactive Nazi era. The vile Nazi propaganda, race-hate, warmongering and holocaust of the Jews made me shake with rage and tears. However, I was equally moved by the films showing the effects of Allied bombing - on the civilians of Berlin. Overall I was impressed with the even-handedness of the historical documentation and Germanys’ honesty about their past. Finally, in the Filmmuseum we saw a funny, moving and intriguing video compilation of German television - from the 1950’s right up to 2008 - which gave me some insights into post-war Germany. While in Berlin I bought 12 art books on; The Germaldegalerie, The Pergamon Museum, Jonathan Meese, the German Neo-Expressionists, the Transanguardia artists, Martin Kippenberger’s hotel stationary drawings, Old Master drawings and sculptures from the Jan and Maria-Anne Krugier Pontiatowski collection, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Max Liebermann and artists self-portraits. I also got two small German comic-biographies on Joseph Beuys and Egon Schiele, a Moleskine notebook, three German art magazines, three German soft-core porn magazines (for future paintings), as well as an expensive new Danish Festina watch, five t-shirts, a hoodie-top and some underwear. I also bought presents for my mother, Steve and Carol. Flush with money from my recent sales - I had never spent so much on others and myself on any holiday.

The first painting I made after returning from Berlin was Nude Woman on a Green Lilo. My main interest in this painting was the transparent green Lilo the woman was lying on in a swimming pool - as she fingered her vagina open for the viewer’s inspection. This acrylic painting took me a couple of very long nights to complete. I saw my gynaecological nude as a twenty-first version of Courbet’s infamous erotic oil painting; The Origin of the World, 1866.

I spent the last two weeks of July working manically on three pencil drawings of the Pergamon Alter and one of a Female Greek Nude Torso that was also in the Pergamon Museum. Each one of these drawings took me over twenty-five hours of intensive work. They were the most complex and ambitious drawings I had ever made. Only my shaded pencil drawing of 1988-1991 came close to their level of difficulty. Steve immediately bought the second Pergamon drawing for e3, 000 to be paid in instalments over four months. Steve’s constant support allowed me to continue to produce ambitious works and gave my life financial stability.

At the end of the second week of August, I completed a series of sexy watercolours of naked girls - taken from digital photographs of amateurs on the inter-net or from the pages of three porn magazines I had bought in Berlin airport. These small paintings were made - with a beautiful twenty-four-pan set of Hordam watercolours made by Schmincke in Germany. In fact I spent the summer in love with all things German.

Around the same time, I painted Celt-Boy another Rorschach blot with writing - this time on a map of Dublin city from 1974. The eye/brain of the ‘monster’ boy - revealed a mini-map of Howth - while his spine and genitals ran down the river Liffey from East to West.

The following week I finished Self-Portrait as a Dancer - one of my best self-portraits of the year. This time the image was based upon - a pornographic photograph from the 1930’s. However, I turned the man into myself and coloured the whole painting in lurid hot-house purples, pinks, blacks and emerald greens. I thought it was the kind of painting an aging Francis Picabia or Kees Van Dongen might have painted. Later that week I painted a quick (about five hours) oil painting of Carol and I - looking deep into each other’s eyes. At the end of that night I painted another quick oil painting of myself - Self-Portrait Pulling Down Lip - in which I used Fauvist inspired pinks, mauves, yellows and dark black outlines. I also started another painting of myself pulling down my eye lid - but it was not to be finished for another three days - over the course of which my mood became more despairing and hopeless. My mother phoned me on the 21st of August to let me know that she would have to go into Beaumont hospital in October to have a large lump removed from the left hand side of her face. The lump had appeared in 2001 but when she had it looked at - in the Mater Hospital - it was thought to be harmless. This time however, the doctors were more worried - since in that space of time my uncle needed a lump removed from his chest and my aunt had to have a lump removed from her colon. For the first few days my mother and I were in a deadly panic. I had thought my life had been too good to be true for too long. I had been waiting for some sort of a disaster. I had visions of my mother dying, of trying to arrange her funeral, dealing with relatives - and trying to live without her love and support. For the following few weeks, Carol and I called over weekly to my mother’s for tea in her bungalow. It was amidst this terror that I competed Self-Portrait Pulling Down Eye-Lid - one of my most visceral self-portraits in which I appeared jaundiced, old and sick. Carol commented that I looked like I was just waking up from a desperate night on the drink.

Later that week I painted a series of quick watercolours of the Red Light District in Amsterdam. I also created a new series of collages - which revealed my crushing battle with art.
In the second week of September DVDs of Keating on Painters (series one 1982 and series two 1983) arrived in my door. Which Carol had ever so thoughtfully bought me on eBay. I joyously relived these lessons on painting - that I had first and last watched, when I was a callow teenager - in the mid 1980’s. Throughout the late summer and early autumn - I continued to write blogs on art - but I did not post them on line. I merely put them straight into my auto-biography. I was fed up with the internet and no longer held out any hopes for a new audience for my work. To me it all began to take on the look of a tower of Babel and a High-School popularity contest of the most meaningless kind.

On Thursday 2ed October, my mother was told that none of the tests had revealed cancer and she did not need an operation on the lump on the side of her face. I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.

Amid the worst economic crisis in a century, I plunged back into panic and depression. I had predicted the crisis as early as the year before to my friends but they had not believed me - but when it came it terrified me. I spent the month watching CNBC non-stop, paying off all my debts, stock piling food and repairing my house. I did only one week of painting at the end of the month - of sunsets at sea, trees, landscapes and demonic figures and heads. Meanwhile I awaited the collapse of the ‘art bubble’ - which I had been waiting to pop for a few years - despite the fact that those in the art world insisted it would carry on forever. I did not have to wait long - less than a month. That crisis made me raise a rye smile. Then at the end of the month, I began to fear for the mental health of my mother. I tried and failed to have her committed. Then in the first week of November, she committed herself. Yet again my life was thrown into turmoil and I felt miserable and fearful for my aging mother.