Noël O’Callaghan has always worked across a range of media, in music, theatre and the visual arts. The breadth of her interests is reflected in Reasons to be Cheerful, the title of her solo exhibition of landscape and portrait paintings at the Lavit Gallery in Cork.
was the title of one of Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ best-known singles, which reached No 3 in 1979. “But I was also thinking of one of my favourite Samuel Beckett plays,” says O’Callaghan. “In the main character, Winnie, is buried up to her waist in sand at the start, and up to her neck at the end. But she still finds ways to be cheerful, like putting on her lipstick, and singing. It’s simultaneously noble and pathetic.”
O’Callaghan grew up in an artistic household in Cork city. Her father Diarmuid O’Ceallachain was a professional artist and educator who’d studied under Seán Keating and Maurice MacGonigal at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, while her mother Joan O’Sullivan often modelled for his paintings.
“Even when I was a pre-verbal baby,” she says, “my mother would be introducing me to my dad’s landscapes. She’d have me up on her hip and be pointing things out to me. I learned the world through those paintings, really. Those little marks that represented a tree or something became more real to me than the real world.”
O’Callaghan’s father taught painting at the Crawford School of Art and Design from 1940 to 1970, and she won a place to study there herself in the late 1970s. “I was quite young, so I had a romantic idea of what it might be like,” she says. “But I found it quite repressive. They kept saying things like, we can fail you. I was rebellious, and I found that being given a piece of paper to say you were an artist grossly offended my sensibilities. All my class had a very hard time. We were the punk generation, and we didn’t like this authoritarian attitude. Maybe it’s changed now. I would hope so.
“But anyway, I put up some cartoons about the system, and I was given an ultimatum; I could conform or get out. So I left. I went on to UCC and studied English and History. I got interested in drama, and after college, I got a job acting with Graffiti Theatre Company.”
O’Callaghan was restless, however, and she soon decamped for West Berlin. “We were living with a wall around us,” she says. “It was like an island. But rents were cheap, and there were an awful lot of empty buildings, so it was very easy to get space for band rehearsal rooms and artists’ studios.” O’Callaghan flat-shared with a German woman. “And that’s how I learned the language,” she says. “I was lucky enough to get a job in a theatre company, and I did that for a while. But then, again, I found that a bit restrictive as well. So I worked in pubs and did some English teaching, and focused on playing music.”
O’Callaghan and her partner Douglas Henderson started a band called Alice Brennan, in which she sang and played percussion. “We were a three-piece initially, with another guy named Mathias. We played Turkish-Irish speed folk, and that, for me, was really liberating. We wrote our own songs, and toured all over the place. When the wall came down, we became a nine-piece and toured East Germany.”
O’Callaghan returned to Cork when her father fell ill in the early 1990s. He died in 1993, and her mother passed a year later. “I stayed on in my family home after that, and immersed myself in painting. I did a lot of plein air painting, and life drawings. I had a life drawing group, and I did a a public life drawing event called Live as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1995.
“To this day, I still do a lot of outdoor watercolour sketches, but lately I’ve been painting landscapes in the studio as well. The paintings I’m making are kind of a distillation of the field work I’ve done over the years, the actual plein air painting. There would be examples of the plein air painting in the show, but a lot of the more recent landscapes are distillations, I suppose.”
O’Callaghan also began making self-portraits. “The first one I painted was on Christmas Day in 1994. I’d always spent Christmas with my parents, and that was the first Christmas I’d ever in my life spent alone. So I decided to paint a portrait of myself, and I called it The First Noël. And then, after that, I’d paint a self-portrait every Christmas Day, and sometimes I’d paint one on New Year’s Day or on my birthday as well. There’s a handful of those portraits in the Lavit exhibition.”
O’Callaghan returned to Berlin in 2000, where she continued to paint and make music, but she and Henderson have recently settled in West Cork. “I came back to Ireland, basically, because I wanted to get away from fascist Germany,” she says. “Germany is re-militarising, and it’s scary, you know? I couldn’t live there anymore.”
The two now perform as the Vangardaí, playing what they describe as “dystopfolk for the masses.” They have also collaborated on a multi-media project called Feathers for Rosa, a tribute to the Polish-born Marxist revolutionary, Rosa Luxembourg.
“We put that on in the New Theatre in Dublin in March 2024,” says O’Callaghan. “The piece is about anti-militarism, really, and the futility of war. We’re performing it on Skerkin Island on July 20 and at Uillinn for the Skibbereen Arts Festival on August 2.”
Painting continues to occupy most of O’Callaghan’s time. “Some of my paintings take 25 years to finish,” she says. “I can never throw anything away. I took a bunch of half-finished paintings back to Berlin with me in 2000, and then I shipped them back again two years ago. I finished some of them recently, but there’s lots more upstairs. I plan to finish them one day.”
