A portrait of the portrait artist
Gavan McCullough has been short-listed for the Hennessy Portrait Prize, for his painting of Imran, a Pakistani refugee writes Emily Hourican
‘IT’S not like everyone wants their portrait done. And out of those who do, you’ve got a subset who can’t sit still. Once you whittle it down, you’re not left with very many options,” says artist Gavan McCullough, short-listed for the 2016 Hennessy Portrait Prize for his oil painting of a Pakistani refugee called Imran. “Imran was great at sitting still, some people are naturally meditative.”
The two met when Gavan decided on a series of portraits of the refugees living in Mosney, close to where he grew up in Gormanston, Co Meath — he now lives near Munich, with his German wife. “The camp is on my doorstep when I’m back in Ireland. All those exotic faces and features — gold dust for an artist. That can sound as if I’m delighting in someone else’s misfortune, which I’m not, but that’s the situation I found.”
During their sketching sessions, Gavan learnt the story of Imran’s arrival in Ireland, one that he will only reveal in edited form. “I’ve had to sanitise his story, because he’s afraid of being identified. He fled Pakistan in 2011 because he stood up for a Christian woman who was due to be hanged for a crime that she was framed for. He was denounced by the Iman at his local mosque and he got beaten, nearly to death. So he moved city twice, but found he was still being threatened, so had to leave the country.”
Gavan’s journey to becoming an artist has had its own share of meanderings. “I always wanted to be an artist,” he says. “I started painting in secondary school, I went to boarding school, Gormanston College, where there was a big emphasis on sport, and it wasn’t really my thing. There was this other guy in my year, and he would disappear every afternoon, go off painting to this wooded area that was out-of-bounds. So I thought, that would be a nice one to try. When I left school then, I had this notion of wanting to be an artist, but my parents weren’t all that keen. They persuaded me to do an engineering degree, in Belfast, and I did it, and, although at the time, it didn’t feel great, that kind of pressure coming from my parents.”
Gavan goes on to say that in fairness to his parents, it was the best thing that could have happened. “I ended up working in IT, and while I was working, I had a bit of money and I started getting sculptures cast in bronze. Then the IT company I was with folded, and gave us all a bit of redundancy money. At that stage, my girlfriend and I decided, ‘ok, let’s go and try and make a fist of this artist thing,’ and she convinced me to move to Berlin.”
There were some back and forth years, when Gavan also worked in the web design company he set up in 2008, but in recent years “I’ve been doing more and more painting, and less of the web design. It’s not that the money is rolling in, but I am beginning to get to a position that I become confident that I should continue on this path. It’s exciting,” he says, “you don’t know what’s going to happen, but there is a negative side too.”
Two years ago he was short-listed for the Hennessy Portrait Prize, although he didn’t win, and then for the BP Portrait Award held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. So what would it mean to win now? “It’s a smashing prize,” he says with a laugh. “€15,000 prize money, which is great, and then they commission a portrait for €5,000 which is hung in the National Gallery.”
And for Imran, the pleasure of knowing that his face, and his story, have a resonance far wider than the walls of Mosney. “All the refugees have their own stories,” Gavan says. “I got interested primarily from an artistic point of view, but their background stories are about failed states and war, about the fraying of ties within the EU so that it can’t deal with the influx of refugees in a humane way. The bigger historical background is compelling.”
The Hennessy Portrait Prize exhibition opens on November 26 at the National Galley. www.nationalgallery.ie