Surrealism! Judge helps The General’s arty brother
IT paints a rather unusual picture – one is a respected judge and the other is a convicted criminal and brother of vicious art heist mastermind Martin ‘The General’ Cahill.
Yet Justice Robert Haughton was more than happy to open the latest art exhibition for criminal-turned-painter, Eddie Cahill, 66.
Beneath The Surface is currently running at the Origin Gallery on Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. And peeling back the layers of the painter’s own history reveals quite a surreal self-portrait.
For Cahill, who has dozens of convictions and spent eight years in Portlaoise Prison, turned his life around 24 years ago through the medium of painting.
He learned his craft from artist Brian Maguire while in prison and said he began to reform himself just as his brother, Martin, was getting into serious crime.
‘I love the art... once I got going when I was in prison, I didn’t stop. I’m at it all the time... It is my way out, it helped me,’ he said.
Martin Cahill’s gang was responsible for massive jewellery and art heists. One infamous theft saw 18 masterpieces, including a Rubens, stolen from Russborough House, Co. Wicklow, in 1986. Cahill was shot dead in Ranelagh on August 18, 1994.
Opening the exhibition, Judge Haughton acknowledged both Eddie and Martin’s serious crimes.
He said: ‘Eddie, as he will freely admit, became involved in a life of crime and quite serious crime, for a period of his life... His brother Martin, we know did bad things.’ He said Eddie was encouraged to take up ‘paper and charcoal’ by Brian Maguire while in Portlaoise Prison, and that ‘a rejection of violence’ is a now strong theme of his art.