One of the best artists of a generation

Micheal Farrell, who died in southern France on June 8th aged 59, was one of the best known Irish artists of his generation

Micheal Farrell, who died in southern France on June 8th aged 59, was one of the best known Irish artists of his generation. A spirited and influential presence on the art scene since the mid-1960s, his work, while maintaining his personal stamp, went through several fundamental changes of style and content, from hard-edged Celtic abstraction via semi-abstract political allegory to passionately engaged representation.

When asked by the art historian Gerry Walker to outline his contribution to Irish art, he replied modestly: "I hope that I helped overcome what was a very weak visual art scene 30 years ago." And in fact he was one of a diverse group of artists, including Robert Ballagh, Brian Bourke and Brian King, who imaginatively transformed the Irish art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He was born in Kells on July 3rd, 1940 to Nora (nee Folwell) and James (Jimmy) Farrell, who was well known as a rugby player with Bective Rangers. One of a family of two boys and two girls, he attended the Christian Brothers in Kells but, though he lived there until he was 15, he remarked to Gerry Walker that he knew nothing of the town's history and heritage. After a spell at St Gerard's in Bray he was sent to Ampleforth where he said he had a difficult time. A born nonconformist, he rebelled against routine and took issue with the teaching of history relating to Ireland.

He enrolled at St Martin's School of Art in London with the intention of studying commercial art, and met and came to know, among others, the writer Colin MacInnes and artist Robert McBride. In 1960 he took a year off, which he spent reading Yeats and Synge near Dunfanaghy in Donegal, before returning to London, where he taught art and became friendly with the painters Patrick Caulfield, Peter Blake and David Hockney, whose work impressed him greatly.

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In 1964 he married Patricia Fampleu, with whom he had three sons. A Macaulay Fellowship enabled him to go to New York in 1966, where he taught for a while at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and absorbed the lessons of contemporary American painting. He particularly admired Frank Stella. Back in Ireland, he enlisted Robert Ballagh, who became a close friend, as an assistant (for £2 and as much drink as he wanted per day), when Sir Basil Goulding secured a mural commission for him at the National Bank in Dublin. Renting space at Ardmore Studios to make the huge canvases, the pair got to know Peter O'Toole, there filming at the time.

Throughout the 1960s, he refined a distinctive personal style which combined elements of large-scale American abstract painting with motifs derived from Celtic decorative art. This work won him several awards, including the Prix de la Ville de Liege, the Prix Europe d'Ostende and a laureate when he represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1967. In 1969, horrified at events unfolding in Northern Ireland, he made an impassioned, landmark speech while accepting a prize at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in Cork, withdrawing his work from exhibition in the North, saying that "art is above politics but not above humanity."

Later, in an interview with Maeve Kennedy in the Irish Times, he said of his move to figuration around this time: "I found that I couldn't say the things I felt like saying. . . I wanted to make statements, using sarcasm, or puns, or wit . . ."

Athough things were going extremely well for him in Ireland, he was disgruntled with some sections of the art establishment, particularly following what he regarded as his unfair exclusion from Rosc. He decided to move to Paris, where with his family he settled into La Ruche, a capacious building with a long history as an artists' residence.

His Presse series, dating from this time, features a motif inspired by the French drink citron presse, depicting lemon juice squirting from between two converging pestles. This initially formal device accumulated wider political implications, culminating in an anguished group of stark, monochrome pieces made directly in response to the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974, incorporating silk-screened reproductions of newspaper reports on the atrocities. Another key series Madonna Irlanda, based on a Francois Boucher painting of Louison O'Morphy, a mistress of Louis XV, controversially depicted Mother Ireland as a scandalous courtesan.

Reflecting personal unhappiness as his marriage slowly disintegrated, his work became increasingly moody and introspective towards the end of the 1970s, and a series of despairing self-portraits depicted him naked, vulnerable and drowning in absinthe. But during the 1980s he rallied to produce ambitious paintings, drawings and prints based on apocryphal encounters between Joyce, Proust, Picasso and various other figures in his personal literary and artistic pantheon. These relate to his evolving thoughts on the role of the artist in - and apart from - society.

He also produced sympathetic portrayals of the village and agricultural landscape around his home at Cardet. His appetite for controversy was stimulated by the clerical scandals of the 1990s and he hit the headlines in 1994 when a group of his works entitled The Bishop's Honeymoon, depicting an explicit sexual encounter between a mitred bishop and a nude woman, were withdrawn from exhibition in Dublin. His most recent projects dealt combatively with the Great Famine and Bloody Sunday.

He met Margaret (Meg) Early, an artist and childrens' book illustrator, in Australia in 1985, and they married in Cardet, France the following year. More recently they have worked collaboratively on paintings. In 1989 he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and during his long battle with the disease endured an intermittent series of gruelling treatments with remarkable fortitude and good grace.

A regular exhibitor with the Taylor Gallery in Dublin, he is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Ulster Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Centre George Pompidou and the National University of Australia.

He is survived by his wife Meg; daughter Georgia; sons Seamus; Liam and Malachi; his brother David and sisters Ann and Jane.

Micheal Farrell: born 1940; died, June 2000.