Graham Knuttel: The great transformer took a while to reveal himself to me

Brighid McLaughlin with Graham Knuttel. Photo: David Conachy

The first time I met Graham Knuttel on Duke Street, Dublin, in the mid-1990s, his hair was bleached white and his face was corn yellow and he just sat and stared at me with a kind of imperious boredom. It was bright in the sunny Apollo Gallery, in contrast to Graham's uneasy pallor. It occurred to me this lad might need a large dose of iron tablets.

At that time, I found him remote, aloof and, by God, he made me fierce uncomfortable. He had an air of dissipation and people who didn't like him said he looked shifty.

Knuttel, like many Irish artists before him, was recovering from a decline hastened by booze and drugs. "Because of the booze I ended up having Christmas dinner in Dundrum's Central Mental Hospital in 1984," he said drily. "Paper hats and a glass of sherry with the chaplain. Now, that was memorable."

Yet, by the time I met him on that memorable day, what he himself called his "skittering, angry, slimy life" had slowly blossomed into tranquil sobriety.

His muse of many years, Rachel Strong, sat like a shadow beside him. Knuttel was staring at her, in a special way, a hungry way. The telegraphy was mysterious, but their devotion and loyalty palpable. They had already survived a desolate existence of what one could only call noble ruin. To me, they seemed indissolubly linked, a privately bohemian double act — two outlawed rebels pushing the boundaries.

She spoke of their lives together, her 14-year heroin addiction and how he would "save his bus fares and tobacco out of his dole and wait for hours at the gates" for her when she was in prison.

I found it a startling disclosure, considering his austerity. Her gaunt face and shaven head, his remote gaze, bore testimony to their tortures. The tortures of heroin, alcohol, hedonism and sometimes hate. I thought them a strange couple as they clanked teaspoons against cups. Yet at that time in their lives their names were and always will be inextricably linked.

They had lived a life beyond the usual. They had lived, to borrow Browning's line, "on the dangerous edge of things", in a time thick with cans of lager and lumps of hash. I saw Knuttel as a tired man up against his own self, with which he previously needed only a nodding acquaintance.

The lie of bohemia is one of the great interior dramas, I thought, as they shuffled down South Anne Street, pale and parched.

One thing I will say about Knuttel is this: he was and remained one of the most highly disciplined and obsessive workaholics I have ever met. That innate artistic production, tied with the tireless efforts of his mentor, Hugh Charlton, caused Knuttel to suddenly emerge as an "enfant terrible" of the Irish art world.

​Within what seemed like months, he had an internationally growing reputation. Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro and several Hollywood moguls had bought a hell of a lot of his work. Knuttel himself seemed amazed and told me he couldn't believe "managers of f***ing baseball teams, surgeons from Mount Sinai and movie stars" wanted his work.

Knuttel was initially renowned for his extraordinary and unique wooden and paper mache sculptures, and I could see why his new paintings would appeal to any movie muscle man. They were cold, colourful, strenuously macho.

Women were bludgeoned into submission by hi-tech colour formulas. Like Stallone, men emerged from battles in tuxedos, pumped up with steroids. Knuttel's work was and is a cocktail of suavity, brutality and James Bond. Once their mission is complete, they stop for tangos with villainesses, a game of cards, then waste a few of them on the way. This was blockbuster art.

There was, of course, a theme to his work. This evolved around the idea of transformation, for if anyone had transformed, changed, it was Knuttel. He used much of his own life experience as images in his paintings. I mean, he worked as a butler for a wealthy family in Greystones, he managed a battery chicken farm and even spent time as a gravedigger. You couldn't invent it.

In his earlier paintings, the aggressive Mr Punch, one of Knuttel's favourite self-images, reflected his dark periods working in Deansgrange cemetery, "usually drunk".

"Punch is my alter-ego," he once told me. "He reflects my moods. We fight the same battles in the same cupboard."

Knuttel, like James Bond, remained reclusive, bound to secrecy. Yet life is not to be measured on this scale of disengagement. It took him a while to reveal himself to me. To relax. Eventually, we became friends and would meet regularly in Graham O’Sullivan's coffee shop on Duke Street with Geraldine Walsh from the Dublin Civic Trust and the artists Markey Robinson, Simon McLeod, Graham's brother Peter, Mick Mulcahy and many more.

​Knuttel never followed fashion. He despised it. His favourite word was "bollix", and he used it often. He couldn't bear what he called "the f***ing Arts Council" and despised the art magazine Circa. He was the first to explore almost psychopathic colour in his painting.

The average Irish person didn't care a fig for contemporary art, but suddenly people cared for Knuttel. That's because he was an artist of the highest calibre. I particularly loved his chef paintings. There was nothing Knuttel couldn't do. The graphic quality of his work translated beautifully into ceramics, screens and tapestries, and he created extraordinary original carpets for the Dixon Carpet Company of Oughterard in Co Galway. He was a creative genius for sure.

Despite the frozen friezes of human life that he executed on canvas, the collision between his professional and private world, I like to remember Knuttel as the man I bumped into in Sandycove a few years back who was still battling life, yet loving it.

At first, I hardly recognised him, and could see by his face he had been ill. "Well, Brighid, it's been years since I’ve seen you and I’m completely banjaxed. I’ve had a liver transplant and Ruth [his beautiful wife who I’ve never met, but seen in the distance] donated me her kidney. Imagine. She's brilliant. Of course, they don't call me Lazarus for nothing."

And guess what? After all that torture with his health, he was still painting. Every day. May the brilliant Mr Knuttel rest in peace.