Mother of reinvention

ART:Magee's partner Gary Katz worked on Obama's campaign videos, and daughter Maeve likes to tell her classmates that 'Daddy made Obama the president'

‘WE’RE MEANT to have nine lives. Isn’t that what it’s all about?” says Maggie Magee as we chat and soak up the stunning view from her house, a vista of a valley in a fold of the Wicklow mountains. We try to add it up, but aren’t quite sure how many of these lives she has lived so far. First there was the childhood in Dublin’s Drimnagh, and school in Goldenbridge, which she doesn’t remember as being “that bad”. Her school wasn’t exactly famous for turning out future artists. “Probably not,” she says, “I think I was the only one.” Art college followed, at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), and it was “brilliant”, says Magee recalling being inspired by tutors such as Brian King and Nigel Rolfe, as well as a generation of strong women students which included Geraldine O’Reilly, Gwen O’Dowd and Kathy Prendergast.

Magee and I are watching the clock, as she has to leave at lunchtime to collect her six-year-old daughter, Maeve, from school. She has a great sense of humour so we’re laughing a lot, and also eating delicious lemon cake which she made that morning. Time is ticking on – and we also have to squeeze in a trip across the garden to look at the art in her studio.

Last year, Magee won a president's prize at the Florence Biennale. But, in between art college in Dublin and prizes for paintings in Florence, there have been several other lives: lives that include editing Oprah; meeting Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; working and touring with former Beach Boy, Brian Wilson; setting up a multi-million dollar company, and closing it down again; and being nominated for both Grammy and Emmy awards for her film production skills. Then she gave it all up to move back to Ireland to paint, perhaps keep chickens and maybe get a pony for Maeve. We take a deep breath and plunge in.

The first stop after NCAD was the US; a scholarship to the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. Magee was interested in performance art, and a photo in her studio shows her naked, breaking panes of glass, blood on her hands and at her feet. She had half forgotten the photo, but rediscovered it, along with press cuttings and other memorabilia from her life, among her father’s things after he died. “They collected all these things, kept them, it was beautiful,” she says.

Wanting to make films as part of her work, Magee quickly discovered that to hire time in a studio would cost her around $600 (€440) an hour. “I went to work for a production company so I could use their facilities. Then I became a partner in the company,” she adds, with that uniquely Irish mixture of self-deprecation and a sense of confidence that all things are possible.

Discovering a talent for business management, and a frustration that the organisation she was with “didn’t want to get any bigger”, Magee set up her own company, Superior Street, and even before it had officially opened, it had its first client: Oprah Winfrey. “We were supposed to open on January 26th,” Magee remembers. “Doing post-production, editing. And we got this call from the producers at Harpo , and we ended up having this 24-hour editing session, all the while hoping the new equipment would work, and in the middle of it I was running out buying cups so we could all have coffee.” Winfrey, she says, has a “forceful personality, and man, does she work those women with her. They worked round the clock.”

During this time she also met her husband, Gary Katz. He had been at the Art Institute too, in the film department. She noticed him when he was “pretending to play saxophone in a band. He didn’t know how to play, but he looked good.” And that was – almost – that. But before they married, there were trips back to Ireland.

“I was testing him out,” laughs Magee. Many Americans have a poetic, almost mythic idea of Ireland, but “Gary got over that pretty quickly when he was in this cold, two-by-two house, no heating, no hot running water. I didn’t prepare him for anything, I wanted to see what he was made of. He came downstairs saying, ‘I think there’s a problem, there’s no hot water’. And we were all laughing, because there hadn’t been any for ages. But he got over it, he’s very adaptable.

“We took him up to Donegal, to a house right on the cliff, with no electricity, and the beds had layers of newspaper on them. And, God love him, he was great. One night he made the tea, but he didn’t make it with rainwater, but with the potato water and it was disgusting. He’s been put through the Irish wringer.”

Katz is a director of photography, currently dividing his time between Ireland and the US. He worked on Barack Obama’s campaign videos, and their daughter Maeve likes to tell her classmates that “Daddy made Obama the president”. Magee describes Obama as “lovely, lovely, lovely – absolutely great. He’s a very genuine, warm down-to-earth man.” He and Bill Clinton, who she has also met, “have this intense charisma, and, although it sounds like a cliche, they really make you feel like you’re the only person in the room”.

With success following success, Magee began to work with Brian Wilson, who is now a friend. She made music videos, tour films, and documented Wilson’s journey as he completed Smile, which he had been working on for decades, “the most important album never finished”, as she puts it. Grammy nominations followed, and we talk about how difficult it is to maintain a sense of self in such an intense world of praise, accolade and the demands of others – a world in which, if you’re not careful, you can start to believe other people’s interpretation of you.

“I was making art all the while I was in film, I had to,” says Magee. “It was survival for me, making these pieces let me focus in on myself. You can get so involved in external affairs, and it’s all about what you can do for someone else, so you can lose a side of yourself.”

Leaving performance art, Magee was now painting; spare, haunting works, where layers of paint, fabric, plaster and dust, may mask hints of photographs and the edges of writing. Influenced by Italian frescoes, and looking at lost landscapes and forgotten things, the works are all about stripping back. “It’s like a meditation, where you meditate on the subject, then meditate on the object, then leave out the subject, then leave out the object and meditate on the meditation, and through that you’re trying to find out what art actually is, to pare things back to their bare essentials.”

We discuss how so much contemporary culture is about avoiding unhappiness, about ducking away from thinking deeply, about skating on the surface of feelings. Magee’s work suggests an antidote to that. She tells of finding a mirror in an attic: “There was a beautiful old frame, with chunks of gold coming off, and so much dust and layering of dirt in the glass it was hard to see yourself through what was between you and what you were looking for. There’s something of that in the work, aiming for an interior perspective. I try hard to keep symbols out, because everything suggests symbols, and where they do appear, I don’t decode them, because it’s up to the person who sees it.”

How hard is it to come from the top of one profession to another in which, despite Grammy nominations and friendships with the famous, you still have to struggle to find gallery representations and space to show your work? “It’s part of another life. But that was that. I’m happy to have had something to show for those 10 years.” That’s also one of the reasons why she sent work to the Florence Biennale, an event where participants pay to exhibit, but which is acquiring prestige. “But I missed collecting my prize, I was out shopping, I never thought I’d win anything, I just wanted people to see the work.

“Film-making is collaborative – that’s why I make art. So much in film gets washed down, compromised. Art is more personal to make, but you do want to get it out, because when people see it, their perception of it is a part of it, it’s an extension of the process, then you know a piece has worked, has left you, has evolved.” Like Magee herself, her paintings are deceptively delicate. Embedded in their layers are traces of some of her nine lives. Looking at them closely, the viewer may also see some of their own. What living in Wicklow with chickens and a pony may bring to her paintings remains to be seen, but it’s hard to imagine, even in this beautiful spot, that Magee will let the grass grow under her feet.

• See Maggie Magee's work online at web.me.com/ maggiemagee/

PHOTOGRAPHY CYRIL BYRNE