Brian Bourke: Paintings of J with a Basque Hat

In Brian Bourke's recent exhibition at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin there are nearly forty paintings and drawings of his wife Jay Murphy. Most of them are entitled "Portrait of J with a Basque Hat" and in these Jay Murphy is wearing this extraordinary hat. She's wearing it again and again all over the walls of two rooms of the gallery. Everywhere you look, she's wearing it. The show at first looks very funny; Brian Bourke has made her face into a caricature of itself, almost a cartoon. It's only when you stop looking at a wall or these paintings and start looking at one of them, you realise that Bourke's intentions are serious.

"I usually paint something which has impinged on me," he says. He seems to enjoy working, to enjoy using different colours and backgrounds to get different effects. Jay is wearing a different dress in most of the paintings, Brian Bourke has painted her on paper, on canvas. He has done etchings of her. He has done eight heads of her in bronze.

"Every time the head turns it's different," he says. "The reason I do several paintings is that I can use alternative ideas and if you're using a model, it keeps the model very lively. In the course of a morning I might work on three of the paintings." Bourke becomes obsessed with things: he was in Bavaria in 1968 and he did loads of paintings of Starfighters. In 1975 he showed his series of paintings of Frau Stutz's Cherry Tree. Two years ago he filled the Taylor Gallery with paintings of himself and Don Quixote, which were hilarious.

He has returned to doing portraits. He says that maybe it's because he's getting more romantic and menopausal, "apart from the fact that Jay is beautiful". He has seldom painted- anyone who liked their own portrait and he always has to warn people that they won't like what he is going to do. He dislikes David Hockney's "dreary portraits of dreary people".

"The Aosdana money is the biggest thing that has ever happened to me," he says. It has allowed him to move house to another but less remote part of Co Galway. "Honda country," he calls it. It has allowed him to stock up on materials. He never tires complaining about the price of materials. It has allowed him not to be broke so much of the time.

Although he talks about being broke, he has worked very consistently as a painter since the 1960s. He has exhibited in the Dawson Gallery, now the Taylor Galleries, since 1965. His work sells well; his work is also reasonably expensive. He is a professional painter, a man who produces the goods. But still the outlay on materials is high. He thinks a reduction in the cost of materials would be maybe better than Aosdana; but at least something has been done about the situation.

He seldom comes to Dublin, although he was born in Dublin and has a distinctly Dublin accent. One reason is his hatred for cars: he will talk at great length of his hatred for cars, what he would like to do to them. A few years ago, Quixote-style, he did a bit of a dance on top of a car and had to pay damages afterwards.

His interests are firmly rooted in the physical. He loves talking about sex, about flesh, about skin. If he wasn't a painter he would probably work cutting turf, or wood. He works fast, goes through materials as though there was no tomorrow. He loves children; he and Jay Murphy used to tour a puppet show. He has six children of his own. "I love drawing new born babies, still fresh from the womb." He has a great interest in babies, so great indeed that when we were in the pub, me trying to interview him, a woman came in with a baby. Brian Bourke immediately wanted to hold the baby, make comments on it, make faces at it, discuss it with the rest of the clientele.

His interest is in nature rather than culture. He is not happy discussing his theory of art, when there still remains to discuss the beauty of women, the joy of sex, a funny thing that happened over in Galway or a dirty story. But behind all the talk about instinct there is a keen intelligence, a sharp eye.

At the moment he is working with wood sculpture which he is then painting. He talks with relish about "heads, necks, torsos, shoulders". He is having another exhibition of new work at the Belltable Gallery in Lmerick later this month.