Mick O'Dea has made 36 paintings in just three months in the French capital. He tells Lisa Marlowewhy the city suits him so well
Guests at an art-show opening usually glance at a few canvases, then concentrate on the more serious business of drinking and socialising. Not so the hundreds of people who came to see Mick O'Dea's Un Salon at the Irish College in Paris on November 30th. Sixty of them flew over from Dublin for the occasion. The walls of the gallery smiled, stared and frowned with something approaching real life. The crowd was mesmerised. Many of the painter's three dozen sitters, of whom I am one, were present. Heads jerked back and forth, comparing the portraits to real-life models. O'Dea wanted to paint Irish people in Paris, and his selection included students, writers, actors, architects, a composer and a diplomat, as well as an ageing French couple who come to sit in the Irish College garden most afternoons.
Helen Carey, the college's outgoing director, saw O'Dea's show Audience at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin two years ago. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of his friend and agent's gallery, O'Dea had painted its patrons, whom he describes as Celtic cubs. Carey and Kavanagh came up with the idea of a residency at the Irish College, to facilitate a similar undertaking in Paris. When he painted the Audience series, O'Dea says, he wanted to capture the mood of the time, but without props such as mobile phones. So he painted everyone against a white wall, to suggest modern, well-lit interiors.
Even that concession to contemporary history has slipped away in Paris. "I absorbed a lot of lessons," O'Dea says of his three-month stay here. The day before he painted Cyril Brennan, the cultural attache at the Irish Embassy, O'Dea studied late-18th- and early-19th-century portraits at the Louvre. As a result, he painted Brennan against a dark background. A Titian exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg confirmed O'Dea's shift to dark backdrops that bring out the face and hands. "The portrait is a timeless thing," he explains. The psychology of his subjects, not the century we live in, is what interests him now.
Although it's not necessarily in his interest to do so, O'Dea works at incredible speed; he has completed 36 paintings in just three months in Paris. "There's a premium on hard-won paintings," he says. "People say, 'So-and-so produces only a few paintings a year,' and that makes them more valuable. Such thinking would have doomed Picasso. I am very prolific. I don't have a nine-to-five approach, but there are periods of high intensity and productivity, and this is one of them. When I have the bit between my teeth and I can't wait to go, I feel quite single-minded."
O'Dea's portraits are a relief from contemporary art that often seems inaccessible, even incomprehensible. "I really have a problem with art that makes people feel stupid," he says. "A lot of art does; I think maybe because the artists are stupid." He isn't bothered by snobs who call portrait painters "mimetic" or "merely representational".
"The implication is: 'Poor bastards; sad they don'thave much of an imagination,' " O'Dea says with a laugh. O'Dea's paintings are often about the invisible threads between people: husband and wife, lovers or more obscure ties of past relationships. Marguerite Baratin, who is 86, dropped by O'Dea's studio in the college to look at his work. "She returned the next day and asked if I would paint her husband, Henry-Louis. I said I wanted to paint them both in their apartment." The elderly couple didn't mind O'Dea dismantling their front door to bring in his easel, a huge contraption that can be hand-cranked up, down and sideways. They gave him lunch every day and talked about Irish literature and Henry-Louis's career at the United Nations. Baratin said O'Dea reminded her of her late brother-in-law, a painter whose canvases of her as a young beauty hang in their apartment. "It was an opportunity for me to paint a French interior," O'Dea says. "The fireplace, panelling and mirror were important elements for me to get a sense of place that the other portraits don't have. It's a homage to Vuillard as well as Bonnard."
The bonds between other couples painted by O'Dea - Loughlin Deegan, director of Dublin Theatre Festival, and Denis Looby, an architect; the cabinet-maker Thomas Jordan and his wife, Catherine Lascroux, a picture restorer - are obvious. But every portrait contains a story within a story. O'Dea recalls Jordan's late mother, Peggy, once his neighbour in Rathgar, who inveigled him into hanging bird feeders in his cherry tree so she could watch the birds from her bed.
The father of the diplomat Cyril Brennan, also called Cyril, was O'Dea's teacher when he was 12. " 'Michael is good at painting and should be encouraged,' he wrote in my school report in Ennis," O'Dea recalls. "I met him in a supermarket 15 years ago and told him how much that report meant to me. When I met Cyril two months ago he said: 'You know my father.' I had to paint him; I wanted to complete a circle."
O'Dea's portrait of the architect Patrick Mellett captures Mellett's personality to perfection. For the first hour and a half of the sitting O'Dea despaired as Mellett fidgeted. "We scrapped it altogether, had a cup of coffee and started over," he recounts. "He got me into his focus, and I got him into mine. Suddenly the man who didn't have much time said: 'Take your time.' I didn't show it to him until it was completed, and it had the profound effect of something achieved through collaboration. I told him how remarkable I thought it was."
Painter and subject jumped on their bicycles and cycled across Paris, looking for a bistro. They ended up at La Coupole, where Picasso, Modigliani and others traded paintings for drinks before the first World War. O'Dea ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate their portrait. "We did it in style," he says. "It was a great night; a real buzz."
O'Dea is on the council of the Royal Hibernian Academy and has taught in more art schools, won more awards and exhibited in more galleries and museums than you can list. Is he an establishment painter? "I suppose I amnow," he says, laughing. "I never had a hankering to be starving. I am who I am. I feel comfortable with who I am."
At the same time O'Dea is a boyish 48-year-old with a strong sense of fun and friendship. "One of the beauties of being an artist is that you never quite grow up," he says. "Not much has changed for me since my student days." O'Dea's father, also called Mick, used to quote George Bernard Shaw to him: "Never let your schooling interfere with your education." His mother, Margaret, nee O'Brien, worked as a nurse in London during the war.
His parents met after his father returned to Ennis from Boston in 1939 and bought a farm and pub with his hard-earned dollars. "Being brought up in a pub helped me become a painter," O'Dea says. "Behind the counter is almost like an easel. You have a job to do, but you're with people all the time." One of his uncles is Martin Hayes, the well-known fiddler. "East Clare fiddle playing is rolling and soft," he says. "When I hear it I see the Clare landscape. The topography and people have influenced me, the same way they influence Clare musicians."
Under Helen Carey's stewardship the Irish College has become a focal point of creative endeavour, not unlike Montparnasse in the early 20th century. "So many amazing people pass through the door, and it's easy for me to grab them and paint them," O'Dea says. He met - and painted - the writer and director Gerry Stembridge, the dramatist Bryan Delaney, the French scholar Dr Angela Ryan of University College Cork, the composer Roger Doyle, the actor Michael Harding . . . Delaney took O'Dea to French theatres. Although he couldn't always understand the language, his work was influenced by "the physicality, the drama, the lighting". O'Dea painted the curator Jobst Graeve bare-chested, wearing a kilt designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. The effect is neoclassical and theatrical. So, too, is O'Dea's portrait of Jackie Blackman, a Beckett scholar from Trinity College in Dublin, who appears in a red turban. Harding is portrayed as he played Jonathan Swift. "It's something new for me to paint someone trying to occupy someone else's persona."
I didn't take seriously enough O'Dea's warning that it takes courage to have one's portrait painted. One rainy afternoon in November I stood still for six hours in O'Dea's studio. The result surprised us both: a canvas that was at the same time me and not me; well executed but not flattering, almost disturbing. Alone among the three dozen paintings, he labelled it a study, "because I couldn't put your name down emphatically". Carey Clarke, a former president of the Royal Hibernian Academy who travelled to Paris for the show opening, said my portrait resembled a Kees van Dongen. There was something "Goyaesque" about it, O'Dea said. It reminded Carey of the painting of Carlotta in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
"It's enigmatic, elusive. You can't quite get a grip on it," she said, concluding: "It's spooky." Although he's not in the habit of doing touring art shows, O'Dea feels Un Salon should be shown in another city. In the meantime, he is seriously thinking of settling in Paris. "I need to find a good studio," he says. "It's a great place to work, and it's not far from anywhere."
Un Salon par Mick O'Dea is at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Rue des Irlandais, Paris, until January 12th, 2007. See www.centreculturelirlandais.com Mick O'Dea is giving a week-long advanced drawing course at the National Gallery of Ireland, February 19th-23rd. Places limited; fee €200