Works °7 — MICHAEL CULLEN

interview by Gerard Dukes; poem by Paul Durcan

ISBN 978 0946641 246     32 pages (paperback)     20x15cm     17 illus

His earliest memories of painting and his reasons for leaving Ireland for his own professional development are just some of the topics discussed by Michael Cullen in this book. He provides insight into the images and symbolism he used in his paintings and the reason for their regular reoccurance, the effect specific places had on his work, the process of painting and just what it meant to him.

EXTRACTS

"Providence has smiled on my improvidence and I have always been able to sell my paintings. You speak of resistance, of having to learn to ‘see’ as you put it. Surely this suggests that there is still a nostalgic attachment to the notion that a painting should disclose itself to a glance, a casual look. Such a notion is simply absurd. A painting offers more than a mere massage of the optic nerves, however seductive that might be. It is to be hoped that the viewer will bring intelligence, attention and a sense of history to the painting. The encounter should not be a passive en face stand-off, but an active interface bubbling with interpretive possibilities. There are some out there who look at my paintings and say, ‘I could do that’. Perhaps they could but why should anyone else try to paint like I do? That would merely compound the absurdity.
          Let me put the matter this way. A post-perspectivist painting aspires to bring merely a hole in the wall through which we see a landscape, an object, a person. The painting insists that it be viewed from only one stand-point, that point where all the implied lines meet, in the eye of the viewer. The Cubists made the break-through by dismantling or deconstructing the landscape, the object, the person, translating the three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional plane. The viewer was thereby released from static looking to active, mobile seeing and reconstruction. In the terms of critical cliché, the viewer is privileged, assigned a role in the painting by the painting. I am generalizing of course, but what I am trying to say is that I work in the admittedly dim light of such generalisations. In many of my paintings I play the surface off against the implied space, simultaneously invoking and revoking some of the major features in the traditions of European painting. There is not much point in having your cake unless you can eat it too. Here endeth today’s lesson."

— Michael Cullen in conversation with Gerry Dukes

see also PROFILE 27 – MICHAEL CULLEN