All's Roesy in his garden

Roesy, the singer-songwriter/visual artist from Birr in Co Offaly, fully appreciates what a gift it is to be able to make a living through creativity.

“It’s totally brilliant. Thank god I didn’t have to get a real job,” he laughs, admitting that during lean times he’s done odd-jobs – including mucking out stables – to supplement what he makes from painting and songs.
Talking to Roesy, it’s clear that he doesn’t subscribe to the ivory-tower idea of art (it comes as no surprise that he couldn’t stomach art college and is self-taught as a musician). Despite his total immersion in creative energy – which he seems to channel 24/7, even in his dreams – Roesy comes across as down to earth. You can tell that his brand new album, Colour Me Colourful (not to mention the incredibly vibrant art installation that he created in The Factory studio in Dublin while he was recording) were both excavated from deep within. Yet they go way beyond the self, reaching out strongly to their audience.
Roesy’s art seems to be a form of soul-mining, with the music offering spiritual comfort, poetic wisdom and beautiful metaphors for life (no facile love songs here, thank god). Meanwhile the luminescent, incandescent, bursting-with-life painting – influenced by native art forms and images from nature – opens windows onto the wonder and magic that’s in the world, if we only have eyes to see.
As with his artwork, there’s a lot of celebration in Roesy’s new album, though you can tell from the lyrics that this artist is no stranger to the dark side.
In fact, finding the path back to hope seems to be Colour Me Colourful’s major theme, in addition to its Joni Mitchell-esque lyrics, the jazzy brass-infused instrumentals and Van Morrisson style of soul.
I ask Roesy whether solace is something that he consciously tried to bring to the album.
“That’s what seems to come out when I create,” he says. “It’s looking for guidance and help outside of yourself to get to some acknowledgement or acceptance of certain things inside yourself.
“I’m fascinated by self-development – that kind of thing. I love it because you can share it with other people. It’s a cliché when people say their writing comes from somewhere else, but for me it does. You look back on something that you wrote that might be very strong with loads of guidance in it, and you go, Jesus, if I could walk half of that I’d be laughing! So it does come from somewhere else, I believe it does anyway – that someone’s looking after you or something.”
Roesy chose to close the album with the extraordinarily gentle and comforting song, ‘Don’t Be Afraid’. I ask him who’s saying these words.
“Well, it’s funny, that,” he says, “because it’s me saying it to a friend who was having a hard time. But it’s like I’m saying it to all my friends, to all the people. You know that saying, a problem shared is a problem halved. And that’s all it is, pure and simple – saying ‘I’ve been there, too’.
“And as soon as you talk about it or go looking to resolve something, you find that people come into your life who will help you. So that song is everybody saying to one another, ‘Don’t be afraid when you’re lost or on the shade.’ It caps off the whole album.”
Contemplation seems to have given Roesy a good idea of where he’s coming from with his music. We turn to the wild explosion of colour – derived from particularly high quality spray paint, a new medium for Roesy – that covers the floor, three walls and the ceiling in a room in The Factory. The blues and reds and oranges are so vivid they seem translucent, giving the effect of stained glass.
“The art one is funny for me,” says Roesy. “I find that I can express myself and I know what I’m doing when I’m writing, and when I paint I don’t know what I’m doing, but it doesn’t really matter.”
Painting is a bit of a mystery to him, he says. “Stuff starts coming out as you start painting, and the more you paint, the more you see this pattern of something and you don’t know where it’s coming from, it just starts showing up all the time. I never really try to make sense of that. Like I’ve been painting birds for the last couple of years….”
Sure enough, there are birds all over the place, and the central focal point of the whole installation is a large bird in a human-like posture, standing with arms and hands outstretched – as though inviting an embrace – with large feathers for legs and, bizarrely, nipples and a belly-button on its torso.
Roesy explains why he finds birds such an inspiration.
“I had this thing in my head that birds, they’re so free, they’re a symbol of freedom”, he says. “But the thing about them as well, you can tend when you’re younger to mix up freedom with chaos – you think that being chaotic you’re being free. And I just got this lovely glimpse and analogy with birds, that they’re up at dawn when the sun comes up and they go to bed when the sun goes down – they follow natural laws, but they’re still free.
“That’s my admiration for them. And that’s why a lot of the birds I paint are half-man, half-bird. Because it’s like us trying to attain that balance, where freedom isn’t just fucking madness.”
Colour Me Colourful is Roesy’s third studio album after Sketch The Day, Paint The Night (2001) and Only Love Is Real (2003). Featuring beautiful backing vocals from Carol Keogh of Automata, and brilliantly produced by Ken McHugh, this latest record is the one that Roesy feels he’s always wanted to make, and he’s thrilled to be touring it right now.
“Doing gigs gives me total calm,” he says. “If I was to think about the fact that I’m standing on stage in front of a couple of hundred people, I’d be mortified. But when I get up on stage, I get out of the way and free myself so the music can just go through me, and with that attitude, I never get nervous.
“When you write a song, you do it from a certain place,” Roesy adds, “and when you sing it, you’re creating a bridge back to that same place. When you’re performing an album live, you’ve got twelve songs that were all written from their own place, and you spend an hour and 45 minutes going over all those bridges into all those different places again, and that’s what I really love.
“When I’m on stage, I feel like everything is graceful and it’s moving, there’s a flow,” says Roesy. “If you don’t interfere with it – if you don’t go out on the piss after it – a good gig can last you days. It’s like coming back from a good holiday.”
Photos Graham Keogh