7 Questions with Desmond Healy

In the first of a series of interviews with photographers, artists and creatives I am absolutely made up to introduce you to one of my favourite artists, the multi-talented Desmond Healy. 

Based in London, he studied Fine Art at Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art. His work spans painting, drawing, etching, sculpture, and photography. He has received numerous awards, such as the Hatton Gallery Painting Prize, the British Institute Foundation Award, the Winsor and Newton Young Artist Award, and recognition from the National Portrait Gallery in London, among others. Desmond has exhibited widely across the UK and Europe since 1990.

1. What sparked your creative journey?
Quite a few things - I started to get a bit obsessed with images and photography especially when I was about 14 or 15. I had drawn and painted as a child, but it seemed to be a less acceptable thing to do as a teenager - unfortunately it wasn’t really taken seriously when I was at school (this was the eighties), but the more I got interested in image-making, the more important it seemed to me. I remember discovering the work of Bill Brandt and Brassai when I was about 16 - I was hooked. These people were showing me worlds that I had no idea existed.

Then I was very lucky to find people at sixth form college who encouraged this enthusiasm (at secondary school I was seen as a “lost cause”) I developed a sort of hunger for images and came across the paintings of Caravaggio, Velazquez and Rembrandt in books. There was a similar reality to these paintings - somehow very palpable and memorable, that pulled me away from photography, but I still have an equal interest in both art forms.
More than anything at that time the idea of the life of an artist seemed to be the only way of avoiding a normal life!


2. Who are some of the artists or photographers that inspire you or influence your style?
The artists mentioned are still big influences. “The Waterseller of Seville” by Velázquez (in Apsley House, London) was the painting that made me want to be a painter. Since then a lot of artists have affected the way I see the world (all the usual suspects (Giotto, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Giorgione, Bellini, Vermeer, Chardin, Goya, Gericault, Degas, Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Gwen John, Picasso, Soutine, Giacometti, Jean Fautrier, David Bomberg, Alice Neel, Avigdor Arikha, Cartier-Bresson, Lartigue, Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, William Klein, Rothko, Anselm Kieffer, Frank Auerbach, Sheila Fell, Francis Bacon, Zoran Music….to name a few) but the amazing thing is that when you think you know these artists, you rediscover something or come across another aspect that changes your outlook.

The great show of early Diane Arbus at the Hayward really altered how I felt about her - there was more tenderness and vulnerability there and reading about her early interest in Chaucer helped me to make sense of her unrelenting, carnivalesque eye.

My own relationship to these figures is constantly developing which is the amazing thing of living with images day in and day out.


3. What challenges or difficulties have you faced or overcame?
The life challenges that all of us have to face are the biggest of all - loved ones dying, looking to find some consolation in the midst of grief. In a way these events also tell us what it is that we value and what is worth leaving behind us.


4. What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Look at everything, be yourself, but remember that you are expressing more than yourself - you are expressing something of the time that you were born into.


5. How do you measure your success or satisfaction as a storyteller, photographer, or artist?
That is difficult to answer - I just hope to touch people on a human level. I think we recognise art and photography that does that - there is that split-second of recognition, like seeing the face of a friend in a crowd. We can spend our lives looking for it - somehow I wonder if it is most important to remain open, aware and responsive?


6. How do you keep yourself motivated, inspired, or challenged in your work?
I guess like everyone, I have highs and lows - sometimes ideas and the realisation of things just seems to flow and at other times I feel like giving up ( go and get a proper job!). Strangely, rejection seems less and less important. I often do teaching and other jobs to keep paying the bills, the important thing as you get older seems to be “am I making the most of this?” - with the bit of talent that I might have, is it full enough?

I always loved that quote from Josef Koudelka “the maximum, that is what interests me”.

The thing for me these days is that ongoing desire to somehow, in a small way, to be a witness for our time - as artists we look at the world and celebrate something of it before it disappears.


7. What artwork(s) means most to you?
If I  could have 3 on a desert island they would be
“The prodigal Son” by Rembrandt
“The Waterseller of Seville” by Velázquez
“The Tempest” by Giorgione
(If I could take some books too, there would be “Gypsies” by Koudelka,, “Lartigue” published by Delpire , and “Life is good and is good for you in New York” by William Klein.)

A friend of mine was looking at a video that his wife had made on Oxford Street. He said “it makes you love people more” - isn’t that it?

(Of course in (2) I forgot to mention all of the other influences, apart from visual… WB Yeats, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Edward Hopper, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits etc etc - people who inspire you to do something with the life that you find around you, to try to make some kind of poetry out of it. But then the list could go on and on….)

View Desmond’s Instagram here.

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