Early Influences Artistic and Technical
1963-64.
My next career move was upward so after two long years on near zero wages of £2 a week I was now 19, engaged to be married, earning €4 per week, working as a dogsbody visualiser and struggling to even give my mom a few bob out of my miserly pay packet.
I was living with my mom in a little flat above the bookies shop on the corner of Botanic Avenue, Glasnevin, Dublin, in the same area I grew up in, still love to this day and often revisit.
It was such a warm safe place for a kid to grow up in where all the neighbours watched out for us kids and kept us safe.
Now I was back there where I belonged, happy finally to be near my old haunt, the beautiful Botanic Gardens, and living with my lovely mom who was going through a hard time as a top fashion buyer.
For her, an older woman now but still very well-spoken, educated and classy, the fashion industry had changed radically with the onset of much younger sixties fashion styles, so we were both under severe money pressure and my measly contribution did not help.
Of course I would have loved to have had the money to study more, in either Trinity College or NCAD, the National College of Art and Design but that was out of the question with my mom’s earnings decimated.
She had spent her entire life making sure I was superbly educated, paying serious fees for my private college education in Franciscan College, Gormanston, but now was pretty broke, so all our efforts were geared towards just paying the rent and keeping a roof over our heads.
On top of that, in 1963, as I mentioned before I was 19, and engaged to be married so there was real and continuous pressure on me.
I finally got a job interview with a truly great ad agency back in the day, OKB, O’Kennedy Brindley, after a series of interviews and I was over the moon. I more than doubled my salary.
Now I was on £10 quid a week.
That was damn good for my age in that business. Now was my chance to earn real money and do some interesting visual work.
Unfortunately, while my impression of myself was pretty good, it was not built on very firm foundations; I was very young, but I was ‘experienced’ in every aspect of small-scale advertising. Why, I had even written copy and headlines a few times myself.
But now I was playing for the senior team and needed to up my game.
I studied and worked day and night, 24/7 even weekends.
Night Classes, Lost Graphics, and Unknown Artists
In 1963, I was 18 or19
I tried night classes first in the College of Art on Kildare Street, with fine teachers, like Fergus O’Ryan, but I knew exactly what I wanted to learn, not so much how to draw or paint which I really did try to learn from constant practice, but I was really interested in the more technical side of the business, print and advertising, graphic design.
I was kept busy with those night classes in NCAD but it was not what I wanted and this led me to Rathmines Tech, where, under Karl Uhlemann, a superb graphic artist himself, I learned a few nice tricks.
I learned in more depth the art of reducing complex designs and photos to more simple 2D planes just as the great artists of yore, from the early poster artists, Beggarstaff Brothers and William Nicolson to the later British graphic innovators, the superb propaganda poster artists of World War 1.
Their use of a flat single primary colour, usually black or dark brown and equally simple flat second colour for dramatic effect was groundbreaking, , all reflecting their use of colour overlays for poster design and book covers.
I was only there a few months when my daughter was born so I quit my night studies permanently to have more time to help around and also tried to get some outside freelance work.
Whenever I mention that one artist and teacher, Karl Uhlemann, I think of the amazing brightly coloured advertising posters for New Ireland Assurance that were everywhere when I was growing up in 1950s Dublin.
There was even a huge one, a billboard on a hoarding, over the Royal Canal opposite Binns Bridge in Drumcondra, beside Mountjoy Jail.
Top Left CuChulainn by Victor Browne. 1934. Top Right Harpist by Karl Uhlemann. 1950s, reprinted 1962.
The two pages are poster and calendar artworks by Victor Browne and Karl Uhlemann.
These images, I should add here, had a hugely important influence on me and my love for Irish history and mythology.
These posters, produced by screen printing in layers of sometimes overlapping colours to produce the greens, purples and the flame reds were just beautiful and dramatic for a kid like myself.
Now I know they were all created laboriously with a hand cut line art colour separation technique and portrayed different heroic characters from our chequered history. I had always thought these were all by Uhlemann but now I’m not so sure and I know no one who can tell me. Despite hours of research I cannot find the information so I am happy for any help in this search.
All I know is that the billboards for New Ireland Assurance fed into my mind and I spent days on end trying to learn to draw figures like them, unsuccessful of course; I was a kid trying to learn drawing and knew this would be a long hard road if I ever took it.
This wonderful series, shown here, by Uhlemann and another lost artist, Victor Browne, who produced a few of these huge billboards is monumental, all masterpieces of screen printing too.
I have zero info on Victor Browne, his work is probably lost forever but have a look at this wonderful illustration of the greatest irish mythological CuChulainn, the style obviously influenced by the likes of the the great WW1 German poster artist, Luwdig Hohlwein, another influential figure in my early artwork, as Hohlwein would be even today, to any aspiring young graphic artist.
I studied in Rathmines Tech with another artist friend Tony O’Carroll, a fine artist himself who was more into fine art painting then myself and I learned quite a lot about modern Irish art and artists from Tony too but the course was not for me.
I already had a job in advertising, an ok income I had a family to feed and support so I was in a hurry.
I pause here for a reason: these fine teachers did not really help me much as I was focused on bypassing this slow learning route and speeding fast forward, all driven by my need to earn money to support my very young family.
But I do have to acknowledge their visual contribution to the formation of my youthful artist psyche. It was hard not to be influenced by these masterworks and years later I went searching for reproductions of them but to no avail until a few years ago when I found a few on the internet.
Here’s a couple of examples so you can see their quality for yourself.
Woodblock print by Fergus O’Ryan Left. Book cover by Karl Ulemann right.