'It's changing from a house we live in to a house we have to protect.' The artist, writer and doctor Brian O'Doherty gives Gemma Tipton a tour of the Italian retreat he has transformedwith a series of murals
I have always been suspicious of books with titles such as 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, or listing journeys you must take, books you must read, songs you must hear. They seem to make life a little like a card index, where the astonishing and the revelatory are reduced to a process of going through someone else's shopping list of experiences. There are, however, some places you'd love to visit simply because you hear they are so beautiful, and some people you would love to have a conversation with just because they seem so interesting. To me, Umbria, "the green heart of Italy", is one such place, and Brian O'Doherty is one such person.
O'Doherty is one of those multifaceted people who defy pigeonholing. His novel, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He is a medical doctor who also studied experimental psychology at Harvard. He was art critic for the New York Times and is author of Inside the White Cube, which is, in my opinion, the best book on how art galleries shape the way we look at art.
He also has a beautiful turn of phrase. "You're implying I approach things with a facile, liquid insouciance," he says when I ask about the ease with which he seems to excel at so many things. "When, in fact, I'm more like a pig on a track, determinedly truffling my way up a hill."
As Patrick Ireland - he changed his name in a performance at Project arts centre in Dublin in 1972 - O'Doherty currently has the inaugural exhibition at the newly reopened Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane.
If you shouldn't live life as if it were a shopping list, there is also that other rule that cautions against meeting your heroes for fear they may disappoint you. In the case of meeting O'Doherty, and making a visit to Umbria to see Casa Dipinta, the 18th-century house in the hill town of Todi that he has filled with his own wall paintings, the experiences are ones to remember and savour.
Todi is a precipitous town, perched on the top of a hill above the Tiber valley, where the river divides the land into areas that belonged, on the one hand, to the Etruscans and, on other other, were influenced by the Romans.
O'Doherty, who was born in Roscommon but now lives in New York, bought the house as a holiday home with his wife, the art historian Barbara Novak, in 1976. He was introduced to the area by the American artist Beverly Pepper. O'Doherty remembers so many people coming to Todi on Pepper's recommendation that "we used to call it Beverly Hills".
Casa Dipinta, a cool, quiet building, seems to exist in a timeless mixture of uneven stone walls, darkly ancient beams and worn brick floors. Its doorway is half-hidden down steep narrow alleyways and around razor-sharp bends that, naturally, Italians like to drive their cars through at breakneck speed.
Initially it was simply a place of escape. Novak gave her husband very clear instructions about their new house. "Everything you touch you mess up. Don't touch my white walls." He listened to her for about two years, then began to paint.
O'Doherty's works at the Hugh Lane take you through a career that has included painting, drawing, books and sculpture - even a portrait of O'Doherty's friend Marcel Duchamp, as an electrocardiogram, recording for all time the beating rhythm of Duchamp's heart.
At Casa Dipinta, the walls are shaped with paint; lines and colour redrawing the rooms, giving new perspectives, taking your eye to unexpected places.
Surrounded by art, it is nonetheless far more relaxing than any gallery. Here you can enjoy the way the paintings bring you through colour, space and time without having to adopt the hushed reverence that museums and galleries seem to require. And you can enjoy them without feeling you have to think up anything clever to say about them. It is a world away from the complex contexts O'Doherty describes so well in The White Cube.
Downstairs, paintings play with the artist's preoccupation with ogham. "Ogham," says O'Doherty, "is an ancient code for a dead language that was never spoken. It is remote yet infused with logic - which the Irish weren't famed for - and filled with mysteries. They translated two of the Roman letters which they never used . . . I wanted the walls to talk and speak."
Upstairs, in the main bedroom, the wall paintings follow a sequence of windows from dawn, through the hot, yellow midday, till night. Over the bed is a view painted in response to Novak's saying the house lacked one - and perhaps to make up for "messing up" her white walls.
Leaving the cool murmurings of Casa Dipinta to go for a coffee in Piazza del Popolo or to have a memorable dinner at the Umbria, a restaurant set into the old city bastions, where views from the terrace sweep across the countryside, Todi seems a vivid escape from the endless tourist queues of Florence. A grassy park runs along the top of the southwestern bastion, shaded by olive and cypress trees, where a winding path leads down to the fairytale Tempio di Santa Maria della Consolazione. Alleys open on to secret squares and hidden gardens, and narrow doorways lead to terrace bars and cafes.
It is a town that seems to whisper to you, like the walls of Casa Dipinta. "The house is an anthology of my past," says O'Doherty. "To some degree it's a wonderful folly, and follies are good things. But it fills so much that you can't fit any more in. It's changing from a house we live in to a house we have to protect."
Fortunately, an Italian foundation is in talks with O'Doherty and Novak about taking it over, creating a Patrick Ireland museum, with a study centre and library. It might even end up in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
Beyond the White Cube: A Retrospective of Patrick Ireland/Brian O'Doherty is at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane until August 27th