John Boorman and Steven Soderbergh buy his work, and Bono and Bruce Springsteen are friends. So is Charlie Whisker a personality or a painter, and how much do we need to know about his life to appreciate his art, asks Gemma Tipton
How helpful is it to know about artists to get the most out of their work? In galleries and museums I often find myself lurching, with the rest of the visitors, from label to label, looking to discover which pictures most deserve my attention. That small scene is a Fra Angelico - I remember him from school, so I'll give it a longer look. That patch of blue is by Ellsworth Kelly, and I've been told he's very significant, so, yes, I'll stand and stare at it for a while. There's a Jeff Koons: it may look like an ordinary vacuum cleaner, but he's always in the papers, so there's bound to be more to it. Looking at art can sometimes feel like being on the fringes of an exclusive, esoteric club. You search for clues to find out where you might fit in, and you do it to see if you can discover what everyone else is getting out of it as much as you do to avoid making a fool of yourself.
Clues abound: where the artist shows, who buys him, who his friends are and who goes to his openings. There's also that question of how much the work costs. Money definitely helps when trying to work out what's worth looking at. Damien Hirst sells for millions, so there's got to be something significant there. On the other hand, the price of a John Gerrard piece almost doubled at a Miami art fair last year, so does that mean his work is twice as good as it used to be?
The price of art tells you its worth as much as its value, and that is often all about creating a market. One British newspaper recently announced that Frank Auerbach is set to be the "next big thing". But Auerbach is 75, and it's not that his work has altered: it's just that Sotheby's seems intent on creating a stronger market for him.
And that's the point: these things have nothing to do with what you're looking at on the gallery wall, but they have plenty to do with positioning an artist in the marketplace. This means that, too often, it can be very hard to appreciate what you're looking at.
With that in mind, perhaps the question should be whether it is helpful to know nothing about an artist to get the most out of his work. The press release for Charlie Whisker's new exhibition, Consilience, tells me that he is an artist worth paying attention to. He "makes regular contributions to shows at the RHA and Solomon Galleries"; John Boorman, Steven Soderbergh and U2, as well as the Bank of Ireland, have bought his work; Bono goes to his openings, and Bruce Springsteen is a friend. He's soon to be included in a list of "artists to watch out for in 2007" (in terms of investment, that is). The release also describes Whisker as a "personality".
All of these facts makes it likely that many people will go to his exhibition, but it also makes it very difficult to look impartially at his work. Is Whisker a "personality" with an art career (rather in the style of Guggi) or is he an artist with an unusually large amount of additional stuff that comes between his audience and his work? These questions are more relevant to Whisker than to many other artists because his paintings are so personal. His motifs come from his experiences, and knowing something of these experiences helps you to get more from his visual conundrums.
Whisker grew up in Bangor, in Co Down. It was a "wonderful childhood", he says, before that "heavy tarpaulin of bleakness fell over Northern Ireland in the late 1960s".
Fragments of memories are replayed. One is holding a dying young man who had been shot three times in the face, in a dark park, and, later, visiting the dead boy's mother, to help her try to find some connection with her son. This experience comes out in the painted repetition of a spent match (one of the things Whisker focused on at the scene) and a picture frame turned away from the gaze.
A visit to the Abercorn with his mother, a week before the Belfast restaurant was bombed and two diners killed, is recalled by the image of a goldfish, a wedding ring and a piece of half-eaten cake. "I remember seeing that fish swimming repeatedly against the glass of its bowl and thinking later that, as the bomb exploded, it might have had a second of ecstasy, finding the freedom it had wanted, before everything fell apart," he says.
Whisker talks about painting as a process of working through things that still haunt his dreams. "It's like the blues," he says. "There is a pain in the blues, a lament, and they sang the blues to get rid of the blues, as an antidote." He describes his work as "portraits of people, with the people taken out. I paint the detritus of their lives".
So what else is it useful to know about Whisker? You can tell he has a strong personality, because eight years in California (working on album covers and music videos) hasn't changed his soft accent. The period in California also introduced a stronger sense of colour to his paintings.
Experimenting with drugs (including LSD) at art college impressed on him the power of intense symbolism and gave him a "reimagination of images". He doesn't take drugs any more, but he says: "It just came along at the right time for me, and I'm lucky I survived it."
He keeps iguanas. He broke up with his wife, the fashion designer Mariad Whisker, a couple of years ago. He doesn't think much of Lucian Freud and Jackson Pollock but loves Francis Bacon, Balthus and Robert Rauschenberg.
Whisker's experience making music videos is interesting in the context of his painting, not because he worked with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen but because the process taught him the value of editing. "Before, I was throwing everything on the page. Shovelling it on. Aidan Dunne [ the Irish Timesart critic] had said that about my work in an early review, and he was right."
Using his editing skills has led to tighter paintings, set up, as he puts it "like forensics". The images and execution have, nonetheless, remained fairly constant. "I still go back to themes I had at 17 and 18, at art college, because they felt unfinished. But you learn a few tricks along the way, and you learn to deliver a better presentation."
It's difficult to say if this repetition of imagery represents a lack of development or a replaying of his traumas, and that is just one of the conundrums of Whisker's paintings.
"My work is obscure if you come to it fresh. There's more homework to do. I always think it's not going to work, but people do buy them. I'm not interested in a painting where you get it all in one go. I like the things to draw you in, and then, when you get there, there's more to see."
It would seem that the iguana-keeping and the marriage break-up have very little to do with his body of work, and yet they turn up in most newspaper articles about Whisker (including this one). "You have to get yourself on the canvas, and, if you do it well, somebody will find empathy with it," he says. The trouble is that, in our media-saturated era, we expect to know about artists' wives, iguanas and famous friends as well as the things that really matter to their work - and then we find it hard to forgive them for the things we have discovered.
We are curious to find out about the rock'n'roll lifestyles of Hirst and Tracey Emin, and then we think less of their art because we have learned those titbits. Yes, Bono may have gone to the opening of Consilience, but in some ways, you might say, his attendance would have had very little to do with the strength of Whisker's work.
Consilience is at the Solomon Gallery, Powerscourt Centre, Dublin 2, until February 24th