Through his work, a “paint eater” seeks connections – to strangers, to his father

On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-May, the artist Michael Flavin walked through the exhibition space in the Dean Art Studios on Chatham Row.

The painter and printmaker’s solo show, “The Spit of a Paint-Eater”, had been showing in the former music school since the previous Thursday and Flavin was invigilating for the day.

In between greeting friends, he approached each of the 13 works on the walls, to talk through their origins.

All bar one had been created in oil paints. The outlier was a monoprint in oil pastels.

Flavin’s subjects were solitary figures, built of thick dabs of paint. They are people at cafes, trad musicians, couples embracing, and moustachioed characters seeming to come from another era.

His show had been billed as a study of how they are perceived, be it as “vagrants”, “troubadours”, “miscreants” or “salt of the earth”.

Many of his ideas grow from chats with strangers, noticing something about them that wasn’t immediately apparent, he says.

“It links to the focus of the work, which is more about form, shape and movement, and the idea that you can look in it, get a feeling, find something,” he says.

As he slowly makes his way around the room, he looks at one particular work, titled In Collusion II. It shows a pair of yellowy and blue faces in the midst of a swirling scene.

From a distance, it is more defined, but up close, it melts into abstraction, he says, from the centre of the room. “It almost loses the form.”

That is part of what has drawn him to paint more in recent times, despite his background in printmaking, he says, “When you get closer, it goes away, and what you’re instead focused on are the strokes and individual colours.”

Repetition and discipline

Born in 2000, Michael Flavin grew up in Raheny. Art and literature were constants of his childhood, he says.

“My mam loved writing,” he says.

While his father, the late Jim Flavin, was a bronze sculptor and the co-founder of Bronze Art Limited, a bronze foundry for casting in Raheny.

Being born into that made Michael hesitant to pursue art in the long-run, he says. “I was still making and being creative, because I was encouraged to do it.”

In school at St Paul’s College, he was more into other subjects, he says. “More into applied maths, and thinking about nano science.”

He took up martial arts at the age of seven. And represented Ireland’s Junior Team at the International Taekwon-do Federation World Championships, 10 years later.

Around his transition year in school, he gravitated back towards art, and his training in Taekwon-do helped to inform that. It taught him discipline and being calm, he says. “A lot of that ethic carried through.”

It also influenced his approach to visual structure, he says. “It has these sequences of movements and repetitions.”

“It is a matter of balance and breathing,” says Flavin, “and it is all about being in a flow where everything is precise and exact in a certain shape.”

Flavin enrolled in the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), and studied printmaking, he says.

Print-making can be quick-fire, with perhaps 30 minutes to make a drawing and get it to press, says Flavin. “But you do multiple takes, so I would be doing seven or eight versions of it in a day.”

Journey into his past

In 2021, during his third year at college, Flavin moved for six months to Bologna as an Erasmus student.

To trace, he says, the footsteps of his father. His father had been at NCAD, but dropped out after one year, and moved to Florence, says Flavin.

Flavin knew a little about his time there. Jim Flavin had found himself working in a villa, Michael Flavin says.

“It was run by a man who would take on artists and as long as they helped him to maintain the house, he allowed them to use the machines he had for sculpture,” says Flavin.

His father had learned much of his own practice there, he says.

When Jim Flavin returned to Ireland in 1986, he started to work in the Cast Foundry, says silversmith Niall Bruton. “That was the main foundry in Dublin doing other artists’ work, the Seamus Connollys and all the big pieces around Dublin.”

In 1988, he participated in the Dublin Millennium Sculpture Symposium, producing Adult and Child Seat, a blued-bronze bench now in St Catherine’s Park beside Thomas Court.

Flavin had personally selected St Catherine’s, a graveyard, for this piece, according to a 2014 Dublin City Council report into sculptures in its public parks.

He drew influence from the form and colour of the gravestones, it says, to create a bench that curves and flows like waves, symbolising the continuation of life.

Above the backrest is a small circle that looks like a wax seal marked with a fingerprint.

In 1993, Flavin founded Bronze Art Limited with his wife Rosemary and Bruton, says Bruton. “Jim was very much his own man and wanted to keep his own foundry.”

Eleven years later, in November 2004, he passed away. Michael was only four years old.

While Michael was in Italy, he visited Florence and the villa where his father had lived. “It was the closest link or connection I got to him,” he says, “because it was the place where he developed what came to be his whole career.”

It was an odd experience but formative, he says. “Coming back from that, for the remainder of my term I did an internship at the Bronze Art Foundry.”

His NCAD graduate show included a small bronze clown’s head.

The paint eater

The last of the artists at the Dean Art Studios were clearing out of 4 Chatham Row on a Saturday morning in mid-May, and Flavin’s show was wrapping up.

Across the street, Flavin took a seat at a table outside the Metro Café.

He had cleared out his own studio the previous day, ahead of the building being taken over by Flux, its new operators.

“Spit of a Paint-Eater” was the climactic exhibition in Chatham Row before the Dean Art Studios closed up.

Its name was derived from the English author Thomas de Quincey’s 1821 autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which Flavin had been taken with while in the studio, he says.

“It was less to do with the focus on opium than de Quincey’s complete obsession with something, and that it became so intrinsic to his life, and function,” he says.

Ahead of the exhibition, paint had dominated his life for six months, says Flavin. “That was around which everything functioned, and based on my interactions, when I was out with people, I was thinking about painting.”

The 13 works on show were studies of faces and figures familiar to Flavin, or observed by him while out wandering the city.

They oscillate between characters with a clear form and those that are more ethereal, seeming to emerge from nature, with brushstrokes creating an environment that resembles scattering leaves or bird feathers.

There is a great depth to the textures in his work, says painter Ami Hope Jackson. “But he also paints life in quite a matter-of-fact way. It’s very much of life.”

In a triptych of works, titled Breakfast with a Narrow Heart, Lunch with a New Tooth and Supper with a Shadow, he studies three solitary figures in a cafe over the course of a day, with the subjects becoming more abstract over time.

The collection drew from his time wandering the city, hunkered in bars and cafes with notepads, drawing with charcoal, he says. “The whole show was based off  of that, strangers in passing, who I was trying to capture very quickly.”

He is interested in people, he says. “I spend a lot of time, whenever I take breaks from painting, going to town, and always finding myself having conversations with random people.”

A clarinettist performed jazz at the show’s opening.

He had only just met him the week of the show, he says. “He came over and said hello while I was on a bench.”

Flavin invited him to the opening. “We left it like that. I didn’t have a number, and then he came,” says Flavin.

That he did, was exactly what the show needed, says Flavin. “It’s about this openness to people, and finding something in them, because everyone has their own interesting character.”