Painting and other plastic arts
Ballagh worked in both Dublin and for a few months, London, as a draughtsman, a postman and a designer. Having decided to return to Ireland, he started on a dedicated artistic career after he met an artist friend, Micheal Farrell, freshly returned from the New York art scene, in a pub, and Farrell recruited him for 5 pounds a week to assist with a large mural commission. The piece, for the National Bank branch on Suffolk Street (part of Bank of Ireland), was painted at Ardmore Studios due to its massive scale. Two early pieces of three-dimensional art, an erotic torso and a pinball machine, were selected to appear at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1967, and Ballagh has appeared in a range of group exhibitions since. Around the same time, Ireland's Arts Council purchased an acrylic of a razor blade on canvas, inspired by a theory of critic Clement Greenberg. Largely self-taught, his early work took inspiration from the pop art movement, and he worked on two early series of paintings, the Package series and Map series, the latter using a mix of acrylic and day-glo paints in inkblots. He next turned to political themes, notably connected to Northern Ireland but also with elements inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the US and the reaction to the Vietnam War. He started to combine elements of social realism with US advertising forms after reading Che Guevara's essay Man and Socialism in Cuba. He also produced three early works which have remained critically recognised ever since, inspired by Liberty at the Barricades (Delacroix), Third of May (Goya) and Rape of the Sabines (David). In 1972, he commemorated the victims of Bloody Sunday in Derry with an installation at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin; it consisted of thirteen rough figures in sand on the floor, sprinkled with (animal) blood, recorded as a series of photoprints.
He was selected to represent Ireland at the 1969 Biennale de Paris, and his work has been shown in solo exhibitions from that year onwards. He was commissioned by his former tutor, Robin Walker, to produce abstract designs for screens in the new restaurant building of University College Dublin.
Ballagh started to work on portraiture with Irish contemporary art collector Gordon Lambert in 1971. As he was at the time still not fully content with his skills in painting faces and hands, he merged his own canvas with a silkscreen headshot of Lambert, over which he worked with sepia ink, and he added the hands in detached three-dimensional representations, which sculptor Brian King made for him from castings of Ballagh's own hands. Over the following years, he painted a series of people looking at contemporary paintings, which proved very popular, with some international exhibitions selling out. Using the same concept, in his first major public commission, for the Five-Star supermarket chain's new shop in Clonmel, he painted a large-scale (c. 80 foot) mural on 18 panels. He used formica, and included himself, his wife and his daughter in the mural, entitled People and a Frank Stella. He also, drawing on scenes from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by locally-born Lawrence Sterne, painted a series of panels for a local restaurant. Other work included a series of six paintings and a silkscreen print linked to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.
He later painted fellow artist Louis le Brocquy, writers J.P. Donleavy (2006), James Joyce (2011, commissioned by UCD), Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, as well as poet Francis Ledwidge, singer Bernadette Greevy, politician Carmencita Hederman and a rendering of Fidel Castro. The Ledwidge, commissioned by the Inchicore Ledwidge Society, is a triptych, with the poet primarily on the central panel, but his arms crossing to the outer panels, which feature a scene from his home village of Slane and a World War I scene. He had earlier painted Joyce in a scene on O'Connell Street, Dublin's main street, with himself alongside. Some years after buying Ballagh's The History Lesson, the scientist James D Watson visited Ballagh in Dublin to discuss a portrait commission, and the Ballaghs visited the Watsons at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, with Ballagh commenting on the new insights into the world of science he gained from the visit. Ballagh worked on a portrait of Watson over an extended period; it hangs in the Genetics Institute of Trinity College Dublin. At Watson's request, Ballagh painted Watson's colleague Francis Crick for a major institution in London, and at the unveiling was one of just two people to meet the Queen, who commented that the portrait was "interesting". Other commissions included Dublin City University purchasing a portrait of former Minister for Education Mary O'Rourke. By 2010, Ballagh had painted 91 non-family portraits, featuring 82 men and 9 women.
Works of self-portraiture and paintings of his family have also been created over time. One of these, Inside Number 3, described by Eamonn Ceannt as moving on from "the conventional architectural perspective of his previous paintings" and marking "a turning round of his own approach to painting", featured his wife as a nude figure on a spiral staircase in their home. That work was preceded by No. 3, with his family portrayed conventionally outside their house, and was followed by Upstairs No. 3. This was a second intimate portrait, with a mostly nude Ballagh ascending a spiral stairway, seen from the perspective of his wife on their bed with a book of Japanese erotica; he commented that he really felt that Inside Number 3 called for a response, and that the needed male nude had to be himself. Later still he painted Inside No. 3 After Modernization (with multiple types of painting included in the background), Upstairs No. 4, and others. In a very different setting, he also painted his family on an extended 1978 holiday near Malaga, in Winter in Ronda (1979). He also used himself and family members as models for generic characters, and, for example, painted two pictures of his daughter in homage to Marilyn Monroe, Rachel as Marilyn I and II.
After many years, and one painting looking out to an exterior scene in the mid-1980s, Ballagh started to paint landscape work seriously in the late 1990s, and his 2002 exhibition, Tir is Teanga / Land and Language consisted of 10 landscapes, albeit not of specific places, but typical of some Irish scenes. Another commission was to paint the Fastnet Lighthouse for the Commissioners of Irish Lights.
Ballagh has served as a judge for a number of artistic competitions, including one for murals in West Belfast. He has also led community arts work in both Dublin and Belfast, and taught art in prisons. One community art project in Dublin, to make a massive mural placed in front of the Custom House, was the subject of an RTE television documentary.
Alongside Cathy Henderson, Ballagh was selected by NCAD and the Services Industrial Professional Technical Union to create a work to tell the story of the 1913 lockout in early 2012. The project, a tapestry series, that was completed in October 2013 and opened by President Higgins at Liberty Hall, Dublin in November 2013.
For many years, Ballagh rented an attic-level studio on Parliament Street in Dublin, overlooking City Hall; this studio had previously been leased by other artists, such as Patrick Collins. After he lost the lease on that in the mid-1980s (it was repurposed as part of the development of Temple Bar and eventually hosted the Walt Disney Company's Irish office), he worked from home. Finding home working difficult with two growing children, in the early 1990s he used an inheritance to buy a house and former piggery on Arbour Hill, less than 10 minutes walk from his home. He renovated the building, and it now hosts his studio and a small flat. The artist has mentioned that he sometimes works slowly and in great detail; in 1982, for example, he produced just two paintings, spending about 6 months on each. His work has sold well at auction. One painting, My Studio 1969, sold for 96,000 euro in 2004.
