Artist Patrick Graham: ‘I can sit with an empty canvas for months. I can sit there and almost weep’

A visit to a painter’s studio can go in one of two ways: the artist might have lined up works for you to view as if at an exhibition, or they might have turned canvases to face the wall, like shy kids at a party.

Patrick Graham, winner of the lifetime-achievement prize in Dublin Gallery Weekend’s inaugural Francis Bacon Awards for Irish visual art, is in the latter category. The 83-year-old artist, who prefers to go by Paddy, is also unmoved by honours, shrugging when I ask what the €25,000 accolade might mean to him.

Instead he’s preoccupied with solving the puzzles of making art that satisfies him. “Every painting I do, I love it for about a week,” he says. And while some artists work on a number of pieces at once, Graham concentrates on a single canvas, from start to finish. “They all have their own life. They all take their own time. They’re like children. And some of them are very bad children.” He smiles.

There’s something mischievous about Graham, a leavening to his seriousness as an artist. He is also rather charming.

We are meeting at his studio at the Fire Station building, on Buckingham Street in north inner-city Dublin. He’s been here since 1993, when he moved from Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, which had closed for renovations.

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The Arts Council invited Graham to rent a space at the Fire Station to help raise the profile of the new, community-oriented centre; its studios are residential, meaning artists don’t have to find accommodation in the city. “I hadn’t enough money to buy a chicken run then,” he says.

In the studio today, only one canvas faces out, its layered, textured greys relieved by a line of marks, each of them one of the seven colours of the rainbow. It is a strange painting, simple from a distance but with more of a sense of barely controlled chaos close up, the colours either hopefully emerging or about to be consumed.

Graham’s benches, table and shelves are highly ordered, their pastels, paints and inks lined up. His knife-sharpened pencils are different lengths, but their bases are aligned as straight as a ruler. There is a neat pile of pages from a sketchbook, some torn-out shapes of drawings, annotated with letters. A pencilled arrow, marked “deep red”, points to a spot in a drawing.

“The process is the same, over and over again,” Graham says. “And every time I say: ‘When you think you’ve learned something, you know you’re an idiot.’ But it’s a pattern I have to go through to resolve each painting. It’s about ego and surrender.”

“Paddy struggles to finish each one,” says John Daly, Graham’s Dublin gallerist at Hillsboro Fine Art. (The artist is represented in the United States by Jack Rutberg, who is based in California.) “I might come in and a painting looks finished. Then the next day he’s wiped it all off again.”

Graham’s paintings have been compared to those of Anselm Kiefer and Cy Twombly; the influential US critic Donald Kuspit called his paintings masterpieces “on a grand physical, emotional and intellectual scale”, declaring them “among the most complicated salient reflections on modern existence that have ever been made”.

Even allowing for hyperbole, that’s quite the statement. But Graham’s talent is of a phenomenal order.

When the artist was growing up, in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, his father left the family to work in England.

“He was a complete wanker. I hate saying that, but in a way it’s true. He was considered a rogue and a rascal. That kind of thing. He was an engineer, and he wound up with a brilliant job in England. Later, I found little notebooks of his with beautiful drawings.”

After his mother contracted tuberculosis, Graham and his siblings were sent to live with different relatives. He wound up with his grandparents, a period that gave him a love of nature. But he loved drawing more.

At school, his art teacher, Diarmuid Larkin, recognised his talent and invited him to work on stage sets at the local drama group. Larkin also entered him in art competitions, with the result that Graham was awarded a scholarship to the National College of Art and Design when he was 13 – too young to go. He took up his place three years later.

Francis Bacon, who the new awards are named after, was a hero “for about, I’d say, 10 years. Then I got tired of them. Something went amiss. I don’t want to talk like I’m the kind of person who can judge someone like Bacon, but I think he got caught up in being Francis Bacon.”

Instead, Graham’s art heroes are “Goya, della Francesca and Rembrandt. Not many outside those”.

He talks about trying to get beyond his skill, which he describes as “a nice pair of hands”. They were much-lauded hands, too, as his tutors lined up to praise his work. But he describes art college as all about skill and style. “You can make and do a painting that is startlingly beautiful, but there it stops, he says. “This is about the struggle to make art that resonates with your very being.”

Graham’s breakthrough came in 1963, when he chanced on an exhibition by Emil Nolde, the German expressionist painter. He experienced the idea that art can act like a punch to the stomach, and to the soul.

After that he didn’t paint again for years.

“I couldn’t bear what I was producing. It was just coming off my hand, and there was a whole lot of something else churning around myself. The way I found to explain it to myself was to nearly drink myself to death,” Graham says.

“At certain points, what I got from booze was an absolute exquisite kind of silence, and the depth of it seemed a potential for something, but that something was never available.”

A long period of recovery followed, and with it the realisation that he had to relearn how he made art.

“My hands interfered all the time – they couldn’t help looking for style – so I had to be prepared to be taught by what I was doing. I tried some awful stuff,” he says.

Even now, Graham continues to struggle.

“I can sit with a canvas, an empty canvas, for months, I can sit there and almost weep. There’s this fight with myself and my ego. I want people to understand that I’m brilliant, and I’m afraid to let that go. But one day I’ll make a mark and it has a voice, and I hear it, and it carries the painting through. And I find it still beautiful, still amazing.”

A breakthrough of a different kind came when the Hollywood horror actor Vincent Price came to see his exhibition at the now-closed Lincoln Gallery in Dublin. Price had heard about Graham’s work from a friend and was waiting outside when the gallery opened. He not only bought paintings but also encouraged Graham to show at an art fair in Los Angeles.

“He was a very nice man. He spoke like he did in the movies, and he had an extraordinary collection,” Graham says. “He’d bought his first print, a Rembrandt, when he was 14.”

The art fair was a success: Graham’s booth won the award for best in show. Gallery representation in the US followed. Cameron Diaz bought his work, as did big public collections, although Graham refuses to name-drop.

A significant survey exhibition of his work, Transfiguration, was held at the Hugh Lane Gallery, in Dublin, in 2022. Did he ever get to a point where he thought: “That’s me, made”?

“No, you learn to love the insecurity of it,” Graham says. “Because you then imagine today as eternity. ‘This is my hour. That’s all I have. F**k it.’”

Francis Bacon Awards 2026

While Patrick Graham is the winner of Francis Bacon Award for lifetime achievement in Irish visual art, Cathy Wilkes has picked up the €15,000 mid-career award.

The Belfast-born artist, who now lives and works in Glasgow, where she went to art college, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008; she represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale of 2005 and then represented Britain in 2019.

Wilkes makes elusive, often introspective collages, installations and sculptures; her art tends to take ideas and memories of domestic scenes but make them troubling and strange.

The awards, which are part of the ever-expanding Dublin Gallery Weekend, are supported by Château La Coste, the hotelier and businessman Paddy McKillen’s wine estate, hotel and sculpture park in southern France.

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The winners will each have a solo exhibition at the Provence chateau, where the permanent collection includes work by such artists and architects as Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin, Sean Scully and Ai Weiwei.

The very generous prize fund will help raise the profile of the Francis Bacon Awards – although that perhaps also only emphasises the financial insecurity that dogs artists, even those with long and successful careers.

Aosdána, of which Graham is a member, offers support to a few. Sadly, however, the Basic Income for the Arts scheme, lauded during its post-lockdown pilot phase as an innovative way to recognise how artists work and to provide meaningful long-term support, has not been extended beyond 36 months per recipient or expanded to all artists in its newly permanent version.

Instead, of the 10,000 artists who applied, it will provide 2,000 – the same number as in the pilot scheme – with payments of €325 a month for three years, very much in the model of Mexico’s long-running art-creators programme.

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What the Francis Bacon Awards and events such as Dublin Gallery Weekend best achieve is the shining of a spotlight on Ireland’s phenomenal art talent.

It sometimes takes big chunks of money, whether in the form of a high sales price or that of a big prize pot, to focus the mind on a different type of value, and on artists who uncompromisingly put up with the financial insecurity, precarious studio tenures and fickle nature of public opinion as they keep on making their remarkable work.

Dublin Gallery Weekend runs from Thursday, November 5th, until Sunday, November 8th. Patrick Graham joins the gallerist Robert Diament for a free but ticketed Talk Art podcast recording at the National Gallery of Ireland on Saturday, November 7th. Cathy Wilkes has work in Technologies of Peace, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, until May 9th, 2027, and a solo show at the Model, in Sligo, until January 17th, 2027.