The art of falling apart
Photo by Dusko BojicIrish Independent
Article by Joe Jackson
Sunday February 26 2006
'F**K God!" is the patently blasphemous phrase Marlon Brando bellows at the start of Last Tango in Paris. It's a kind of primal scream in response to the suicide of his wife in the movie. Artist Darryn Lee has been bellowing something similar since the day in 1999 when he saw "mashed" into a tree the red car in which his 19-year-old brother Martin had been killed a few hours earlier.
It's a cry that comes across in his work. Albeit, sometimes in a coded manner, as in the painting "where a girl is seen wearing a bikini and cowboy boots and sitting on Thomas the Tank Engine" and Darryn has penned the words "speeding is naughty" - simply because to be more explicit would further upset his folks who "suffered great heartache" when their son Martin died.
Though Lord knows how they will respond to Darryn's mercilessly explicit Caravaggio-influenced painting of Jesus Christ juxtaposed against a dictionary definition of the word 'bastard'!
Darryn intellectualises this concept by saying: "God and the Virgin Mary weren't married, so they had a child outside marriage and I'm just trying to highlight the hypocrisy of the Catholic hierarchy who incarcerated women in Magdalene laundries for having 'illegitimate' children, even though their own head man was a bastard."
So is that concept debatable? Obviously. Provocative? Ditto. But then Darryn also hates "the political correctness that has taken hold these days". He feels it threatens artistic expression and - most definitely - it won't be a part of his performance art exhibition Suicide Is Sexy at Dublin's Ave Maria venue next Tuesday - during which Sonia Macari will hang herself, and Gavin Lambe-Murphy will commit suicide with a shotgun.
Lest you miss the post-modern irony in the title of that performance, I guess I had better point out that Gavin's shotgun will be the same one Darryn himself so often wanted to press against his own skull between the ages of 11 and 15.
But meanwhile, I wonder how his folks respond to his art.
"My mother is supportive, but my father has no interest in it at all," responds the 30-year-old, who was born in Kildare, moved to Navan at the age of eight and is one of four children.
"And I think they'd prefer if I was . . . say, gay, rather than being an artist. Because my art is something they just don't understand - even though I started drawing at seven and that was the only thing I ever won an award for at school.
"All of which is why I haven't invited my parents to this show. But they both are fairly open-minded and probably wouldn't have a problem with the Christ painting."
That said, Darryn "always knew" his folks loved him and says he had a "good childhood" in this sense. So why the suicidal feelings during his teens?
Mostly because Darryn contracted elephantiasis, which meant that his testicles grew to an inordinate size - unsurprisingly, leading to much mockery from mates at school. Later on, he tells me, there were "lots of girls in nightclubs putting their hands down my trousers just to check" - which may sound like every schoolboy's dream, but made him feel "even more like a freak".
As a result, he drank to excess.
"I drank far more then than I do now, but I never thought of how that might be affecting my moods," he muses. "Yet from age 11 to 15, I really was suicidal and I'd go out into the yard with a bottle of vodka and shotgun, and I'd often think of killing myself.
"I was just so sick of everything that I became obsessed with death. It wasn't until I was 16 I told someone about this - my GP - and he seemed petrified, like it was too much for him to handle.
"A lot of it had to do with elephantiasis. Even my teachers would say: 'Take that sock out of your trousers.' Most people at school did think I had a sock down there and would come and gawk at me. I didn't need that attention, and it led to great stress. But at 18 I had an operation and that sorted everything out."
Quite. But not quite. Because Darryn's trauma didn't end there.
On the contrary, one side-effect of that operation ("because the anaesthetic was wrong, as my GP believes, or else I was given the wrong injection") was that Darryn lost the sight in his left eye. At one point, it was even feared he might go blind in both eyes, "which was even more distressing".
But he didn't, and these days he still regards that operation as fundamentally liberating. At least it was liberating in the sense that he felt confident enough to leave home and "start life anew" as a plumber, which Darryn now claims he became largely to please his dad.
"My father was - and still is - very much into business. He had his own concrete company before he bought a shop and B&B in Navan. So I decided I'd get a 'proper job', went to Bolton Street and qualified - the lot," Darryn explains. "But even though in the end I was earning good money, I knew the creativity was being kicked out of me.
"What I really always wanted to be was an artist. I'd always been fascinated in particular by magazine art. Especially magazines like Loaded, because I found the images in them so arousing, so beautiful, so sensuous, just like the way the old masters used paint on canvas."
Clearly testosterone-driven, not long after leaving home Darryn moved in with the first of "many girlfriends" he's lived with, but today he realises he "probably didn't feel anything real for her", other than the lust that can dominate young men and women's first love affair. "Especially when it involves losing your virginity," he points out.
Despite this, Darryn was still with this first girlfriend when his brother died, and now admits he "couldn't speak about this subject" until last year.
So what were the actual circumstances surrounding Martin's death?
"He and two other young guys were coming home from a nightclub, half-four in the morning, probably speeding a bit, and they hit a tree. All of them died," he says, suddenly shivering.
"I remember I was in my apartment with my girlfriend. I remember the knock at the door, a garda saying: 'Sorry, I have bad news for you.' Then I got in my car and drove to Navan. But I never, ever, will never forget the moment I saw the car mashed up in a field. In fact, that was the most devastating moment of all for me. Because Martin's death then became totally real, so I pulled my car over and cried like mad. Actually, I went crazy, basically."
And "crazy" is the word that best describes Darryn's behaviour in the period immediately following his brother's death.
Yes, Darryn did meet that woman with whom he fell in love - but feeling he was "a bum, which is what my dad called me" and that he'd "never be successful as an artist", he decided to study art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.
Not only that; Darryn's girlfriend was supposed to join him in Florence three months later and even "sat in Dublin Airport with her ticket" waiting for his phone call, which never came, because he had gone "crazy" in Florence. Particularly sexually, though he now sees this kind of sybaritic excess as an "act of defiance" against God. Last tango in Florence, indeed.
"Actually, I ended up attending the academy for only one day, because I found it so boring. But I stayed in Florence for a year and didn't have to work because I'd brought £12,000 savings with me," he says. "I also did 23 paintings, as opposed to the two paintings most students do during their academic year. And I became obsessed with death - again - but not in the abstract way I was obsessed as a kid. Martin's death made it more of a physical reality, and I suddenly realised it was waiting for us all.
"So the first paintings I did were of me in a coffin. It was like I was jumping one step ahead of God, saying: 'F**k you, God, I'll die when I want to and even dictate how I look in my coffin. You brought me into the world, but you won't dictate when I go and I f**king won't end up mashed against a tree like my brother.'
"Looking back now, I see that this obsession with death must have been part of what made me have sex with so many girls that year. Nearly a hundred. It was as if I was spitting in the face of death that way, too.
"Many of those girls were young American students having sex for the first time, so like me they weren't really interested in relationships, they just wanted sex. No one really got hurt."
Really? Obviously, Darryn's girlfriend got hurt. And hurt to such a degree that her mother has "frozen" Darryn out and he can't "source" the woman with whom he first fell in love.
Despite the psychosexual explanation he gives to his behaviour at the time, does Darryn now accept he treated that girlfriend appallingly, and was - to put it bluntly but appropriately - just a prick?
"Absolutely," he says. "Even before I went to Florence part of me had begun thinking she'd be better off without me. But, even so, my original hope was that I'd study art, be successful and make myself 'worthy' of her. Yet that's not the way it worked out, is it? And that's totally my fault.
"But at 23 or 24, I had a lot of growing up to do. Still, I think of that girl every day, I get remorse over what I did - and I really do believe I'll be in love with her until the day I die."
For those who look for a moral in such tales, Darryn also readily admits he "didn't have sex, even once, last year" and is currently living alone. Sometimes, he says, he gets "very lonely" and even "deeply depressed" if he feels his art isn't "progressing".
But, on the other hand, unlike many penniless artists, Darryn owns four properties and doesn't need to make a living from art, which frees him up to "take on only those commissions" he chooses.
Either way, Darryn Lee definitely knows what he ultimately wants back from art. Namely, the ultimate defiance of death: eternal life.
"I always loved the idea that, because there is no wind on the moon, Neil Armstrong's footprints will stay there for eternity," he says. "So, when all is said and done, I want my paintings to be, in the same way, my footprints on this earth."
©Joe Jackson
'Suicide Is Sexy' takes place at 7.30pm in Ave Maria, Clarendon Street, Dublin 2, on February 28
- Joe Jackson
posted by Darryn Lee @ 1:19 PM
