Portrait of the young man as an artist

At 29 years of age he is one of this country’s most precocious and promising figurative and landscape painters. The world knows him as Rasher, but he was born Mark Kavanagh in 1977 in Bray, Co. Wicklow, where he attended St Killian’s School and St Thomas VEC.

Largely self-taught, Kavanagh first caused a stir with a series of self-mounted and one-man shows in Dublin which snagged him a high profile Late Late Show appearance. Since then, his work has been collected by Colin Farrell, Princess Haya of Jordan, Louis Walsh, Ali Hewson and Adi Roche, and last March he made his first foray into the US art world with an exhibition entitled Under The Blue, staged at the legendary Chateau Marmont in LA.
In contrast to rainy Irish melancholics, Kavanagh’s paintings celebrate Mediterranean and Californian colour and light, although he will admit to a fascination with themes of love, loss and “people on the edge of things,” hence the Tom Waits allusion in his still life of a solitary man Tom Traubert’s Blues.
And while he’ll namecheck masters such as Caravaggio, Dali, Bacon, and Hopper, Kavanagh’s work isn’t without pop art energy (Hollywood Hitman, Skaters On Venice Beach) or humour (Girls On Bikes, Late Night Caller), although, for this writer’s money, his most recent paintings, semi-surrealist flowerscapes such as Storm Of Poppies and Lucifer Flowers, are among his most remarkable work.
Friendly, talkative and somewhat dishevelled, tufts of hair protruding from under his trucker cap, the artist meets Hot Press in a pub adjoining Bray train station in order to mark the paperback publication of Declan Lynch’s The Rooms, for which he has supplied a suitably austere cover image.

Peter Murphy: First the nickname: why ‘Rasher’?
Rasher: I grew up on a council estate in Bray, and everybody had a nickname, same as anywhere. One summer, I must have been about five or six, I was sunburned on my back, I’d really blonde hair and I was really skinny, and my brother’s friend said, "Jesus, he looks like a streaky rasher." Ever since then it stuck. I grew up in Old Court, or the White City, as we used to call it. It used to be like houses in Beirut, flat-topped, aluminium or enamel roofing, a real concrete and metal shanty town. But it was a great place to grow up in, hundreds of kids out on the street, we were always making slings and weapons. In council estates it’s great, ’cos you come out fully equipped, with armour. When we moved to another estate they didn’t have any of that.
How did you conceive of the cover image for The Rooms?
They said, “Read the book and see what you come up with.” I had a friend that’s an alcoholic’s wife, and I had driven this person to "The Rooms", and one of the places was a hospital, and that kind of gave me the background. I wanted to have it in a clinical kinda place, there’s no picturesque scenery. And I wanted to have him as the main figure and have the drink demon pulling out of him, or he’s pulling away from it, ’cos it’s his battle. There are references in the book to God, so there’s a reflection from the light of the door, a white cross. And the clock was there, because time is hanging over yer man’s head, it’s a matter of time before he slips.
I wanted people to look at the cover and think, “What’s behind those doors? What can happen?” A friend of mine told me he’d fucked up people’s lives, and it’s a horrible, cold, scary kind of place (to be). And so he has to go to The Rooms to get that good feeling. And you can feel the coldness of those places and see those grey stacking chairs, but it’s the warmth of the people in there that gets alcoholics through it. But you couldn’t make a nice warm setting for this, ’cos it’s horrific.
Can you remember the first painting that had an impact on you?
It wasn’t until I think I was about 13 or 14. All the stuff in the books, like Van Gogh’s work, didn’t really impress me at the time, I was more impressed by Caravaggio, the classical stuff, the use of light. Or Rembrandt. When Salvador Dali died in 1989, I really noticed art because it was more colourful and weird and cool looking.
But I didn’t really get into it until I got caught sucking aerosol cans and I was grounded coming up to the summer holidays. My brother would be out on the piss and there’d be loads of beer change in his room, so I used to rob all that and go down and buy a load of cans and end up doing it down the fields. Then I got pissed off with that, so I started doing it at home, lying up against the wall, sucking it until I basically conked out.
How did you get busted?
My mother came in to tell me she was going out, and I was there with the can stuck to me lip. I woke up and thought it was some sort of trippy little dream, but when I started looking for the can and couldn’t find it I knew I was caught and it was after being taken off me. So that was it, the silent treatment and grounded for three months. We didn’t have much entertainment back then, Playstations or X-boxes or any of that kinda shite, so I just started painting and loved it. At that time I didn’t even think of a career, I just wanted to create.
Did you have any kind of mentor?
Well, the teachers in school always encouraged me and gave me more materials to keep going, but they had their hands full with the other kids, so there were no extra lessons after school or whatever. I had to fend for myself. The teachers knew I wasn’t going to go onto college ’cos I wasn’t academically brilliant. I was in the lower class, and we were regarded as… they were just going to end up being labourers or whatever.
So you didn’t receive any formal training?
I applied to a Portfolio year down in Saint Thomas’s in Bray and they looked at the portfolio and said, “The amount of work that you have we’re impressed by, but because you don’t have your two honours and four passes, you’re not going to go onto college. But basically we’ll let you in because we do think this year will benefit you, at least it will give you some idea of how to use your materials properly.”
So they taught me how to draw and use my eye and perspective and ceramics and stuff, which really did benefit me. It was like that glimmer of hope, a bit of confidence. But it doesn’t matter if you’re Caravaggio or Rembrandt, they’ll still say no if you don’t have the results.
How did you manage to get your work accepted by galleries?
I had a local exhibition and then got into a gallery in Dublin, who accepted me, just about, ’cos they give you all this, “You’re a young artist, we’ve a lot of collectors in this gallery, if you give it up tomorrow, that’s their investment gone.” So it was more or less another begging job in a way: “Can I leave my work here and see how they go?” So they sold the three within the first week and then they took in more. When I started off I was a slower artist and the work would have been better, and then the gallery influence takes over: “We need more work,” and then you start picking up the pace and your work starts to suffer. Some of the work that I did I hate because I had to work quite fast to make a living. If I could burn half of that period I would. But the reason why I left that gallery was I wanted to slow down and concentrate and have better technical paintings, rather than having to supply a market.
Art versus commerce – the old conundrum.
I used to mop floors and lay carpet tiles at night time so I could paint during the day. I didn’t want to go back to that. To paint a picture that might sell is better than laying down carpet tiles.
There seems to be less stigma in the art world about being perceived as a self promoter with a hard-nosed business sense, compared to the music or literary worlds.
Yeah, you can get away with a lot of stuff. Dali did advertisements for Alka Seltzer and French chocolate. Quite funny and quite surreal, but he could get away with it, he’s still a credible artist.
The strange thing about your commercial commissions is I’d seen them a few times before realising the brand name was there for business rather than aesthetic reasons.
I painted four or five pictures for Jameson with the bottle in them. I tried to blend it in with my own style. Like, when I paint flowers, I’ve been questioned about it, as though it’s not what I really want to do, and it is, I’m huge into Monet’s paintings.
They’re my favourite paintings that you’ve done.
I find the angles that I use have something different, it looks surreal and a bit off. But just talking about art… it drives me up the wall to hear the waffle that comes out of me. I wouldn’t be allowed do it with my mates in a pub, they’d throw a pint over me: “Shut up ya fool!”
You exhibited in the Chateau Marmont in LA last year. Why there?
One of the things that appealed to me was John Belushi died there, the Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded there, Led Zeppelin and The Doors stayed there, just the atmosphere. Most hotels in LA would be all glitzy and minimalist but this was dingy and dark. The hotel was a book of history itself, a lot of writers used to stay there.
Do you get nervous before exhibitions?
The Chateau was the most nervous I’d ever been. Before I went down to that exhibition I got sick. But when I got that out of the way I had another couple of drinks and I was grand.
We had contacts over there, I did a portrait of Colin Farrell and his mother, and from that he offered his publicist, so she took on the show. And the guest list was Heather Graham, the lads out of Scrubs, the lads from Outkast and all this. And I was like, “What about the collectors? Are the collectors comin’?!”
You’ve also done work for the Chernobyl Foundation.
One of Ali (Hewson)’s favourite painters is Jean-Michel Basquiat and she was saying, “I have one or two of them in the house,” and I was nearly falling off the chair. I didn’t want to ask, ’cos I didn’t want to be that forward, but she did invite me round to see them. I’ve haven’t met Bono, I’ve met Gavin and had a few drinks. Guggi’s a lovely chap. I know they all started painting through Charlie Whisker. But I can’t really say I hang around these people or drink with them.
What do you think of the portrayal of painters on film? On average, they seem to work better than the ones about rock stars.
You reckon?
Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, Lust For Life, the Francis Bacon film Love Is The Devil. And I loved Ed Harris’s Jackson Pollock film.
That’s brilliant. Beautifully shot.
Did you ever see Scorsese’s short film Life Lessons, about the obsessive action painter?
What’s his name, Nick Nolte, yeah. He was really getting into it wasn’t he? The freedom of what he had. It looked like, “Fuck this!” It looked like he was having so much fun!
Do you ever feel like that when you’re working?
Yeah, you just wanna mash it up and then leave. But there’s an instinct inside me that’ll go, “That’s not right.” It’s only when I’ve done a big body of work that I’ll feel I’ve shown my full range of ability, and once I get that done maybe I’ll start experimenting.
Same with all the great jazz musicians. Once they’d mastered the form, they exploded it. Do you listen to music while you’re painting?
All the time. I’d listen to a lot of jazz and a lot of rock. Classical music. Everything that’s not rave or house; that would drive me up the fuckin’ wall. Every band that’s out there. Radiohead. This band Wolf Mother, quite Led Zeppelin-ish, but not bad. I’m always on the hunt for new music, eight hours a day. I’d even notice, if you put on a bit of metal, a bit of Slayer or something, you paint faster. It’s unbelievable, you can see it in the brush strokes.
Bitches Brew, Miles Davis, he was the first one to introduce the wah-wah pedal to the trumpet. There’s an old saying, know the rules before you can break them. Then you’ve earned the right. Even Picasso, at 15 he was a classical painter, and he was bored at an early age. He started Cubism when he was 27. To have that insight is unbelievable.b

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