A Touch Of Glass (Part 2)

When he wasn't working on stained-glass commissions, he was painting: "Painting is more important to me but it is more difficult. You have so much freedom in painting, it is quite difficult to cope with." He painted landscapes and still-lives but "when you work for the church, as I wanted to, the subject matter becomes a part of you. You are asked to paint a Transfiguration and you do the best you can. Then three years later you are asked to paint another one. You find it has changed and you paint something quite different."

He shows me his most recent Transfiguration - the left-hand panel in a large triptych entitled The Life of Heaven which was part of his one-man show at the RHA Gallery last year. The various figures which surround the white-robed, transfigured Christ are painted in an arresting mixture of colour, from soft mauve to rich blue. The right-hand panel, The War in Heaven, with its lurking serpents and devils, is mostly mauve. The dramatic centrepiece - The Fiery Chariot, full of movement and energy - is picked out in hues of yellow, cerise, scarlet and purple.

He has favourites - favourite colours, favourite pieces of work - but he prefers to keep them secret. He does divulge the work which was the greatest challenge to him: "It was the Stations of the Cross I did for Ballycasheen Church in Killarney in 1993. It is a long sequence of images. Each has to be itself but also have an integral relationship with the others. The journey is the last journey of Christ - a daunting one, full of suffering. At the end of it all, I didn't want to look sideways at the subject of Christ."

He has two daughters, Roisin (21) and Naoise (20), who he describes to me with great, if restrained, paternal pride and affection: "Roisin is studying Philosophy and Theology at Milltown Institute and Naoise is studying childcare.

Roisin is ironical and Apollonian. Naoise is our Dionysian: passionate, enthusiastic and artistic." His wife Noirin gave up weaving while the girls were growing up but has recently bought a loom and is planning to build a studio of her own adjoining the house.

A self-confessed individualist, he has strong opinions (which he is wont to express in his frequent letters to The Irish Times). "One of the things I feel very strongly about is the current transition in this country to the materialistic world. People are bewildered by the onslaught of materialism. Our devotion to the church was so craven in the old days, and this has crumbled suddenly. People now take freedom more seriously than goodness. There is a great need for the church to teach us again what Christianity is."

He is cynical about "the new, 20th-century order of socialism and modernity" with its "deceitful rational discourse": "The hope was that modernity would set us free to be ourselves but now after two great wars and the collapse of communism, people see that modernity is just an abstraction. It has secularised our language and our imagery. This could be an opportunity for the church - a new lease of life. And there are lots of things about our Christian civilisation that could be improved. In the past, religion was seen in too spiritual a way. We were not allowed to acknowledge our creatureliness."

He sees the Catholic Church as being split between those who try to engage with modernity and those who refuse. He prefers the latter, conservative side, represented by the beliefs of the current Pope. He voted for Mary McAleese and was dismayed by the controversy over her taking Communion in a Protestant church:

"It's a pity she had to make a political statement out of it. It was not so much what she did but how she did it that disturbs me." He voted for her because "Christianity means something to her, Catholicism means something to her and at the same time she's a woman of the world."

The role of the artist, he believes, is highly political but goes beyond party alignment. He is not a member of a political party and often changes his vote: "I tend to vote for certain individuals whom I trust."

He has always been "for the talent that is individual" and was a member of several different artistic groups in Dublin down through the years, including Living Art, Independent Artists and Figurative Image, all of which were made up of artists who were not conforming to "established fashion".

His associates spanned several generations of Irish artists, from Norah McGuinness (in Living Art) to Elizabeth Rivers (in Independent Artists) and Sean MacSweeney (in Figurative Image). Rivers was an important mentor and MacSweeney has become a close friend. Of the younger painters he admires Veronica Bolay and Paki Smith. In his spare time he enjoys listening to classical music: "It must be my mother's influence. I like Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Sibelius." Music can "get around the mask of verbal communication, which is often just a whole lot of goddamn talk."

He has been inspired by Beethoven's sonatas, the way "he beds three or four perhaps contradictory movements in a figure of notes that would establish a unity of form within the contradictions". He sees a parallel between the sonata form and the triptych: "In a triptych, as in the movements of a sonata, different rhythms animate the parts and counterpoint them with each other as a poet might, through incantation, convert a story into an epic."

The current enthusiasm for installation, video and conceptual art has not put him off his determination to follow his own path. He sees it as a passing need "to prove how international we are": "Painting is a risk. Any creativity is. You address those who have ears to hear. Maybe the collective humanity only has ears for certain things at certain times." He smiles wryly: "There is a great need for neutral art in public spaces at the moment. I'm not in competition for that kind of space. Can you imagine something as terrible as a crucifixion in an office? It would blow the whole thing."

So although he is not currently picked to represent Ireland at the big international shows, he is happy to be paid large amounts for the work that he has no difficulty in selling at home. "There is still a core audience for painters. The corporate bodies love installation art and rarefied aesthetic stances. But ordinary people want art that relates to the human condition."

As the photographer fusses with his shots of Pye I snoop around the studio and come across an essay he has written entitled An Academy I Would Like to See: "An Academy School of Art must be a school for `seeing', not just seeing as the scientist and the technologist see things (to recognise and manipulate them) but seeing things with the inner eye as well as the outer eye. We must be taught to compare, to evaluate and to envisage. In this way the eye is educated and the inner eye is persuaded not to be ashamed of itself."

Pye, along with other members of the RHA, has been asked to make suggestions for an arts school, which the RHA is thinking of establishing. Is there a school of Irish art? "We love colour and in that we're closer to France and the Latin countries than to Germany and Britain, who are more draughtsmen." And the inner eye? "Ah yes," he muses. "Seeing is very difficult. We are all blind. The artists are the ones who know this."

Eileen Battersby is ill.