Former TV personality and long-time artist Kevin Sharkey is one of Ireland’s great characters, never short of pricking the bubble of the national psyche with a controversial opinion. Lois Kapila met the Donegal native to discuss his latest exhibition at his new Dublin gallery space - and his possible ambitions in the political sphere
Woopdy-woo.’ ‘O.M.G.’ ‘Whites Holding Colours Back.’ Some of the paintings in Kevin Sharkey’s new exhibition have very silly names, while others seem straight-up political.
Nobody ever warns newbie artists about the thousands of titles you have to come up with, he jokes. “You know to be honest, sometimes it’s your sense of humour, sometimes it’s personal experience or memories or friends.”
A few years ago, a newsagent on O’Connell Street told Sharkey to ‘fuck off back to your own country’, the Donegal native says. Not long after, he sold a work entitled ‘Fuck off back to Ireland’ to a “very posh” lady for a hefty sum.
It’s a bright mid-November morning at Sharkey’s gallery on Dublin’s Molesworth Street where ‘Colours’, his latest show of work from the last two years, opened at the beginning of the month.
The room is sparsely furnished and dominated by the colourful splashes and swirls of paint on canvases that line the walls. Sharkey has only just rushed in but he quickly settles into his chair and begins to chatter, like a man who has stepped into a pub and is spilling over with stories to tell.
He has to use his paintings to lighten encounters like the one with the newsagent, he says. “I was able to laugh at that, once I decided to call it the painting. But up to that point I was a little bit like, ‘Umm, that wasn’t very nice.’”
So is there a tale behind ‘Whites Holding Colours Back’? “The thing is I’m the worst person to talk about my paintings,” he says. “My conversation ends when I put my signature on it.”
Art, for Sharkey, is about colour and energy, creativity and escape. It’s not some grand intellectual endeavour, he says. “It’s a fucking painting and if you don’t like it, piss off out the way, you’re blocking someone else’s view.” He waves his hands in the air at an imaginary critic.
Long and bumpy road
It’s been a long and bumpy road for Sharkey – through abuse, depression and destitution – to this chic gallery near St Stephen’s Green, where his paintings are now selling for as much as €52,000.
Just weeks after he was born in Dublin in 1961, he was adopted by a family in Killybegs in Donegal. He was the only black child anybody had ever seen there and was treated like a “little Martian”.
Some neighbours would give donations to his mother for the black babies in Africa; others would stuff money in the side of his pram. Then there was the woman up the road who would always give his friends a biscuit each but save a banana especially for him.
However he’s not as interested in attacking what he sees as ignorant but often well-meaning people who cling to racial stereotypes, as the media which beams out these prejudices and regularly portray black characters as crack dealers and criminals.
“You think, ‘Well hang on, there are people who don’t know black people who are going to get a very strong message from this.’ Jesus, I even get it as a black man. I find myself apprehensive of black people. So I’m thinking, ‘Fuck… if I get it, what’s it like for white people?’”
But he reserves his harshest criticism for his former employer, Ireland’s national broadcaster.
“I think the biggest crime that is happening in Ireland is that fact that RTÉ refuses point blank to acknowledge that the face of Ireland is changing, and it is never going to be the same again,” says Sharkey, who was the first black television presenter in Ireland about 20 years ago.
“The only reason I got a job on TV was because I was seen as an ethnic flavour. An ethnic flavour from Donegal. I mean, think about it.” He says he tried to contact the head of RTÉ six months ago to talk about the need for change but there was no response.
‘We are all racist’
Sharkey declares he has more time for people who admit they’re racist than those who say they are not. That’s because overt racism is not the biggest problem, he says. It’s the hidden prejudices– the sideways glances he gets if he sits in a café with a red-headed girl; or the fumbled, insidious jokes at a pub – because you can’t confront those and talk about them.
“We are all racist… I’m sick to fucking death of all this bullshit of, you know, ‘Oh, I’m not a racist, I’d have sex with Naomi Campbell, Oh, I’m not a racist, I have a black friend.’ It isn’t about that,” he says.
“It’s about ‘Yes, you are, and maybe if you own it and accept, you might be able to shift it.’ Because being born ignorant is fine, but if you resist enlightenment, then more fool you.”
Sharkey says Sinn Féin is the only party ready to discuss growing diversity in Ireland. A vocal supporter of the party, he’s even been talking with deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald about running for office. And the party seems to be toying with the idea.
“They’re counting up – ‘Hmm, we could get the black vote, the gay vote, and the Irish dancing vote,’” he laughs. But there’s an edge of seriousness to his comments.
“I’ve spent a lifetime outside of politics, criticising like most people, saying they’re all shit,” he says. “But actually, I’m getting to that stage in thinking, well, if that’s the system that there is, then perhaps you can do something to work with it, and make some difference.”
