Michael Wann: ‘If you were out walking in the rain, trees swaying, your work should encompass that sensation’
Art: What Lies Beneath
Niall MacMonagle
Michael Wann's brilliant and powerful 'Camille'
When Camille Souter was invited to paint a self-portrait for the National Portrait Collection she said that she’d be “absolutely bored stiff” at the idea of “putting a mirror before me to paint a self-portrait”. Instead she painted Self-Portrait as a Cod’s Head because “we’re all related. Life is pretty big.” But Michael Wann’s brilliant, powerful, realistic portrait of Souter captures her unique personality.
“It came about”, he says, “one sunny afternoon sitting outside a local pub in Achill in 2017.” Famously private, she wasn’t keen but “after some gentle persuasion she relented”. Souter, who died aged 93 in 2023, did not live to see this portrait of her but Wann has captured her “long life of lived experience”.
As a child, he spent hours “copying faces out of newspapers” and at school he had “a particular fascination with geography and history textbooks, those black and white photos of rolling hills and sprawling cities, industry and agriculture, war and whatever else”.
His creative talent was encouraged, with visits to the National Gallery, the Gate Theatre and “conversations around the dinner table might start concerning a particular Jack Yeats painting featured in a newspaper and end up including the Famine, the Civil War, Irish identity and WB Yeats’s love of Maud Gonne”.
He did the Leaving Cert Art twice – “the history part of the curriculum wasn’t my strong suit” – and then went to Sligo Institute of Technology to do a one-year foundation course with “no notion of staying”.
After college, Wann worked briefly with Barrie Cooke, stretching and priming great big canvases.
“Barrie spoke about weather like no one I had ever heard” and “it slowly began to feature in my drawings, and by now it is a daily fixture. If you were out walking in the rain, the wind howling, the trees swaying, then your work should try and encompass that sensation”.
Wann also thinks that as an adopted child “some of my drawings of isolated views and broken terrain and hinterlands in some way speak about aloneness, solitariness”.
Charcoal, “extremely versatile”, is his medium. “You can make the darkest and blackest of blacks but then just as easily manipulate it to the most ephemeral shadows of grey. For a monochrome medium, there is a broad, almost endless range of differing hues to be found.”
When his father died 20 years ago he made large-scale drawings of smouldering, burnt wood piles in woodland near Lissadell. “They seemed to my mind to resemble funeral pyres”, the drawings “acting as a sort of container for the loss I felt”. And during a particularly difficult period in his life, “whatever was clogging up my head at that time” his 36 self-portraits "resolved itself though the act of drawing and seeing”.
AIB Portrait Prize is at the National Gallery until March 9; ‘The Old Grieving Fields’ opens at Dublin’s Solomon Gallery on February 6. Wann has been shortlisted for the Orpen Self-Portrait Prize
