The long-standing Queen of the Irish art world, RHA and Aosdána member Pauline Bewick has also taken up the role of an Ambassador for Culture Night this Friday, September 16th. Turning 81 this month, her arresting life to date has been well documented - not least by herself, in memoirs released in her eightieth year.
Pauline is quoted as saying this on the Culture Night website: “As a Culture Night ambassador, it is an honour to promote the power in humans to create the fun in art and music, as there is too much attention given to violence.”
I began by asking the artist what exactly she means by this.
“I was watching a program on these prisoners and they were being taught singing and they were learning music," she says. "They really became different, more whole as human beings, these really desperate criminals. Music did that for them. There are happy things that we can give unhappy people that can change their outlook on life and show them another aspect of life besides the one they are locked into.”
Bewick believes that art should be accessible. She tells of two prior Culture Nights where she exhibited in Dublin's Taylor Gallery: “They come milling in, and I'm criticised for this but I'm always in the papers [and] there is no damn harm in that at all,” she says. “It brought a lot of people to the exhibition, some who had perhaps never been in a gallery, but because they had heard 'Oh, Pauline Bewick, she's that one that does...' and so on, they came.”
"I think culture is not a good word for the general public,” she adds. “They will feel cut out by that word. We've got to make it good by making it fun, so that people learn that that word ‘culture’ is not elitist. I think it's really and truly (up to) the creators. I don't mean that they should dumb down their work, I'd hate that. They should open their minds and clarify things more to people. If they are in the newspapers, and it's taking up space in a vulgar paper, then that's great! It could have been filled with something ghastly!”
How Culture Night can challenge attitudes is something that excites Pauline. “Making it all free is a marvelous idea,” she says, “and doing it in the evening, also - the atmosphere on the two evenings in the Taylor Gallery was very much ‘Well, we're having fun here and now we'll go on to the next thing.' It was very much a fun atmosphere. Even serious art, even Samuel Beckett is serious but fun. I think that it is fun to be serious.”
Bewick is infused with a tangible passion for the ability that art has for expressing one’s innermost thoughts and feelings. She shares an anecdote of a time spent teaching an art class in a Dublin garage: ‘There was a group of women, mostly," she says. "They all were reasonably okay but one woman did a tiny little picture of a flower in the middle of a big page. I'd heard that there was a man who asked people to go into a soundproof booth and shout and then come out and paint the shout so I said to these women ‘Go out of the garage and give a yell, make a noise and come back and paint it.’ The woman that did the tiny little flower said ‘Oh no, I couldn't do that’ - so I said ‘Well, in that case think of a noise’. She thought about it, and then all of a sudden got her brush and drew a very long thick green line at the bottom of the page, then a zig-zag of red and then a blue stripe right across the top of the page. It was amazingly strong, you wouldn't think it was the same person. She was able to explain she had a walk on the golf course that morning and an airplane passed very low between the green and the golf course – it was wonderful. She freed up from that day on. It sounds as if I'm suggesting that all art should be this therapeutic thing, but I actually think it is, and that we are motivated by our psychological life, I know I am anyway.”
Her own formidable body of work pictures woman and beast in co-existence and eternal movement in nature, often underwritten with a bold, mythological feel. Ultimately, she explains, her paintings are escapist. “A lot of my work I describe as ‘If only’ paintings,” she says, “if only we could lie without clothes in a field without fear of disapproval, somebody saying ‘Oh my god, look at that…’ I don't think it out, but looking back on my pictures I do see that. A good few years back I did a whole series of women lying on swans, because they are so beautiful, so regal, so elusive… That was like ‘Wow! I want to be connected with it all.’”
As she boldly enters her ninth decade, what is next for Pauline Bewick?
“I want to go on being creative. I write even though I'm dyslexic, I write by telling the story to a girl who writes it all down for me. I certainly want to go on painting – I love doing that, and when all that joy goes I would like Ireland to have euthanasia because I'd be happy to feel that I was in charge of my future rather than leaving it to the girls (her daughters Poppy and Holly), because I witness how unhappy my husband poor Pat is with Alzheimer’s (NB: Pat tragically passed away shortly after this interview was conducted). I'd like to work, even if I'm in a wheelchair, as long as I'm happy. Being involved with life is terribly important to me. I still am bursting with creativity, but being 81 I have enormous bursts of energy in which I do a lot of work, painting, thinking etc – it just happens, and then I collapse into a sleep. Then the cycle starts again.”
Pauline concludes our chat with advice to those wanting to share their creativity with the world. “I think Culture Night is a nice seed to plant, this culture seed we'll call it, hopefully people will appreciate their own ability and think ‘My pictures are worth sharing too.’”
Pauline Bewick will be giving a talk and presenting some new work in the Kerry County Council – Killorglan Area office, Library Place Killorglan at 6pm until 7pm on Culture Night, Friday 16th September - more info here.
Find out more about RTÉ's Culture Night programme at Dublin Castle here.
