Artist

Artworks and words by Michael O'Leary.

[From the Introduction by Gregory O'Brien]

"...In Michael’s paintings as in his poems, there is a looking this way and that; a bob each way; a contrariness in keeping with the contrary nature of most things. There is also a particular delight in the collision of ideas, in the bringing together of unlikely ingredients—a relish in contradiction very much in the spirit of Oscar Wilde: ‘The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.’

...

The primary ingredients in Michael O’Leary’s soup, as this book makes plain, are art and poetry - although into this O’Leary-esque mix you could also add music, cricket, trains, cultural studies and antiquarian books. What other traits might we observe, from this distance, of Michael’s art: a certain iconoclasm to accompany the rowdiness; a disdain for fustiness and lazy thinking. A hatred of conservatism. There is also a peculiarly Irish delight in the obscure, the mythical, the enigmatic—witness his 2010 painting, ‘A Church, a Silver Owl and Two Donkers’. What, you might ask, is a donker? I consulted an on-line dictionary: ‘A mystical creature that was created in the land of Brunet St, more specifically, the tree of wisdom. They are most known for the estranged sound it makes. “Eeeee-yuh.”’ Is this a joke or, another quintessentially Irish form, a riddle? Answer that question however you will.

It is immaterial whether or not Michael O’Leary believes in the profound connectedness of things or whether things in his poems and paintings just randomly link up. He is more committed to a process than to an end result. He steps and stands where he will. Another great virtue is his propensity for not doing what he is told. Even Captain Cook, in his heyday, knew as much: ‘A man would never accomplish much in discovery who only stuck to his orders.’ Michael O’Leary is a wanderer off the beaten track—more Robinson Crusoe than James Cook, it should be said. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is one word to describe Michael’s genre-crossing fleetness of foot - although I’m sure he would reject any word that contained ‘discipline’, art being better described as an indiscipline, a state of flux, resurgence, a bringing to new forms of consciousness.

And there we leave Michael O’Leary, very much on his own terms: amidst his teeming orchard of forms and ideas, following rather than holding in check the migratory, fugitive nature of the artistic impulse. And so, on these pages, we observe a poem become a drawing, a painting become a poem, or clump of prose. We observe a very individual sensibility, shaped, as are the rest of us, by all the things he has loved and also by the things he doesn’t love so much."

Gregory O’Brien