Works °17 — MICHAEL MULCAHY

interview by Mairead Byrne 

ISBN 978 0946641 475      32 pages (paperback)    20x15cm     17 illus

Michael Mulcahy is an expressionist painter, who has travelled extensively, in north and west Africa, India and Korea, where he has lived and worked in the local communities. These experiences have profoundly informed his life and work. 

EXTRACT

"The essence of discipline, in my eyes, is you’re as mad as a snake but as disciplined as a Samurai warrior. And that gives you enormous freedom and flexibility. Discipline is like day-time. Running wild is night-time. You can’t separate the two of them and one enriches the other. To put it another way, it’s necessary to go mad in order to stay sane. You must go way out, way out, way out, and see what happens. Then you come back. You burn yourself out in a way. People try to stop you burning yourself out by saying you’re mad or whatever. That’s their judgement on a unique situation. But they don’t understand the rules of that situation. I love getting involved in a situation. Like when I was in Korea, I basically became a monk. What they do, you do. You’re a chameleon. When I go somewhere, I leave my emotional baggage – whether it’s cultural heritage, whatever – at the airport...
          [Painting is] a sense of beauty, a sense of entering into a realm that’s not directly related to your ego. There’s something else out there that keeps the whole business going ... It’s paying tribute to something greater than you and trying to understand these sort of mysteries. Painting, in a way, raises a question that goes beyond the mundane. If you approach a painting with an empty mind, the painting will speak to you rather than you speak to it. People feel that they must know, they must understand about painting immediately. You can’t do that. You must be prepared to say, well, here is something that I don’t understand. The fear of not knowing pulls down a shutter which says ‘this is useless, this is of no relevance’. So it’s just having the open mind to let the painting seep into you. The beauty of painting is that you may only understand a tiny bit of it. And with that sort of tiny understanding, it gives you curiosity which gives you power to continue working. So you’ll never understand painting. That’s its mystery."

— Michael Mulcahy in conversation