“He was a brat.” It’s said with such affection and longing. Ruth Mathers is talking about her husband Graham Knuttel, the artist who epitomised the Celtic Tiger, living a life as colourful as his distinctive paintings, and who died in 2023 at age 69.
“I think people gravitated towards Graham because he was such a brat. He could be a little bit bold.” She recalls running into strangers in a pub or restaurant, making connections, bringing them home to party, dancing on their kitchen table. Sometimes they became friends, or bought his paintings. “These people seemed to find him in a room in a minute. Graham was the best fun human being I have ever met. And yes, torturous at times.”
Knuttel was irreverent with celebrities too. Sylvester Stallone famously bought multiple paintings. “Graham said, ‘I have canvases that aren’t as stretched as your face’. He got away with that. Other people would probably be fecked out on their ear.”
When he died in May 2023, Knuttel’s Facebook announced he’d “engaged in life as he engaged in his art – that is to say, boldly and without reserve”. The blond artist was sparky and spiky, with a taste for the good things. Says Mathers now: “He’d not play by the rules. He did his own thing.”
RM Block
Knuttel was widely collected (Robert de Niro, Joanna Lumley, Michael Stipe, Frank Sinatra’s manager Jerry Weintraub), a fact possibly related to his ebullient personality and canny marketing.
Critics’ ambivalence perhaps related to his prolific output, what writer Gemma Tipton described as “perhaps a problem with volume”, where “a certain kind of success can encourage many artists to paint works that look like their art, and yet which aren’t inspired by the same intense urge”.
Yet even in death he seems irrepressible.
There’s no mistaking whose house this is, entering Ruth and Graham’s terraced Dún Laoghaire home of 10 years. His art is everywhere. Bold, bright, dodgy characters, gangsters, molls, birds and cats and other creatures, crowns, uniforms. All over the walls, plus stacked on the floor. A painting near us at the kitchen counter, of his first home. Three bronze heads nicknamed The Accused. A bronze foal.
A giant wooden wall sculpture of a red cat dominates the hall. His student painting of serpents entwined around a tree is more muted and delicate than his recognisable later style. Downstairs in his studio in the garden, a papier-mâché cat still sits on an easel; on a shelf, a clay king he made towards the end.
Some of these are in a retrospective of 50 pieces this month at the RDS: sculptures, paintings, handmade tapestries and woven tapis, with about a dozen pieces for sale. The exhibition is organised by his friend and long-time agent Noel Kelly, also known for representing RTÉ stars. The show has gathered or borrowed work, including Kelly’s early Knuttels and a chess set he made with David Linley, and recast pieces from Knuttel’s original moulds.
It’s mostly prints on Mathers’s walls. “I don’t have much original work. We sold it. Because, when he got sick ... I had to.” Sculpture was “his favourite. More than painting.”
The 80 pieces sold at an Adam’s auction in February Knuttel had sold to a US gallery years ago.
Mathers is quiet-spoken, warm and humorous. In the way of those who’ve suffered trauma, she recounts the details of illnesses, surgeries, hospital appointments, treatments, culminating in her donating a kidney to him.
He first got sick around 2017. He started dialysis on New Year’s Eve 2018. “It was a dreadful day. But look, he was very tough guy, and he got through it all right.”
Her mother had moved into their basement apartment, where “she was extremely happy”. Then her mother got cancer. Mathers’s mother and husband’s relationship was colourful, with mutual slagging. “They kind of got on, you know, in a funny sort of way. You’d have to be watching them.”
Knuttel had an 11-hour liver transplant operation while on dialysis. “The doctor said: ‘Fantastic surgery, very, very weak patient. He’ll be lucky to get out of here’.” He was in and out of ICU for months.
[ Graham Knuttel: 10 things you didn’t know about the artistOpens in new window ]
He was discharged as Covid hit, and “the real fun began”. With the rehab facility suspending visitors, he insisted on coming home. For years over Covid, Mathers nursed both Knuttel and her mother.
Knuttel was blunt, telling her: “‘You’re not going to get the two of us through this pandemic alive. One of us will probably go ... Just don’t be blaming yourself at the end, is all I’m saying’.”
Yet within months, between sick-bouts and dialysis, he worked. On Easter Sunday he insisted on going down to his studio. He could barely walk.
He’d always been disciplined, “in the studio by eight. The radio was always on. He treated painting like other people treated going to a job.” Now sick, he could only manage a few hours.
Mathers’s kidneys were tested. “I’m a match for you,” she told him. “He said, ‘Oh, I knew you were a match for me.’ I said, ‘I can give you my kidney.’ ‘Oh, that’s grand. That’ll make it easier. Won’t it?’ I felt completely deflated.”
There was a lot of parties in that house. People would knock on the door at two in the morning and all that carry on
Becoming a kidney donor is a serious operation. Her mother was very anxious. She had fears herself, but “you don’t let yourself go there. I remember thinking, it’s a little tiny bit of light. I was really positive. The idea that we could be normal again was so huge. If he wasn’t on dialysis, we could start to get him back right. That was a chance for me as well.”
The transplant was on May 16th, 2022. Immediately before hospital he insisted on going to lunch, off on the mobility scooter. She didn’t join him because “I was scrubbing the skirting boards. He wanted to know why. I said, in case I die and somebody comes in. The place is manky.”
Five weeks later he fell out of bed, with a bleed on the brain. There were three more ICU admissions and a brain operation. Waiting for surgery in Beaumont, “was the first time I saw fear. The first time I saw tears.” Meantime, her mother’s tumour wasn’t responding to treatment.
The couple first met more than 20 years ago when Mathers opened a restaurant opposite his South Fredrick Street house. “He introduced himself, asking Madam, why do you have no art on your walls? I said we don’t have the budget at the moment. He said, right, come with me.”
Together they brought several prints over. She worried about affording them. “Madam, did anybody ask you for money?”
They became friends. More, “didn’t occur to me, because I thought we were so ill-matched. But we got on grand. He had diverse groups of friends he’d bring into the restaurant. He was always lovely to the staff, but not necessarily to the people he brought. The Celtic Tiger was still roaring away. It wasn’t where I was in my life. The Four Seasons and Lillie’s, it wasn’t me. That’s where Graham-land was.”
Their friendship became “the relationship that changed both our lives”.
She prepared canvases, varnishing finished paintings, making papier-mâché, ordering supplies, meeting clients. “He tended not to like meeting people buying the art. We worked well together as long as I did exactly what I was told. They were good years. It was sort of perfect for a long time. We had great fun. He was great fun. But also he worked really hard, six days a week.”
His city centre house was where he’d worked and lived for years, with his daughter Kate. She now has three teenage daughters. “We had them a lot in town when they were small. They thought he was crazy. We’re still all pals.”
“There was a lot of parties in that house. People would knock on the door at two in the morning and all that carry on. It was great fun at the time, but I think maybe we’d hit the time for a little less full-on messing.” She was sad to leave in 2014, but later with illness and pandemic, it was better out in Dún Laoghaire, which Knuttel had loved since art college.
A few years earlier they got married, she thinks in 2011. “I should know the answer to that, shouldn’t I.” Registry office, L’Ecrivain restaurant, “then back to the house for the mother and father of a party. Dublin City Ramblers played in the basement. You could probably hear them as far as Grafton Street. Every headbanger seemed to be there. The clean-up was something else.”
He made ageist, sexist jokes, but they meant absolutely nothing. I think he may have been the most unwoke person I ever met. That doesn’t mean you’re not a good human with a good sense of humour.”
Noel Kelly suggested a retrospective. “He and Graham go way back, into the 90s. In the States he couldn’t get over how cool Graham was around those big names.” Knuttel was keen. After Kelly left, she recalls him saying “You know that this means? A new suit.”
After Knuttel died, Kelly used to check in on her. Later he asked how she felt about a retrospective. She wasn’t in a great place, “but I thought, how amazing would that be. Graham could be awkward, but he loved to show and exhibitions. Working on it has been amazing, with a lovely group of people. A very positive experience.”
[ Graham Knuttel art sells out at Adam’s auctionOpens in new window ]
Knuttel was prolific, sold plenty, made money in his heyday. “But he was sick for so long. That’s when you churn through any finances, and there’s nothing being made. You don’t countenance somebody being sick for that long.”
Friends are travelling to see it. “This is to honour his work, and the man.” Presumably the retrospective will also make money? “As long as it cleans its face, really, at the end of the day.”
A year after the transplant, with medical approval, Knuttel, Mathers, Kate and Kate’s eldest, Ella, went to Spain for a long weekend, “his first time out of the country in six years”. He never returned home.
They had tapas, and wandered cobbled streets, Knuttel using a mobility scooter. They left a restaurant early because he was tired. Mathers checked him in bed at 11pm and 3am, when he drank water. At 6am, he was dead.
“It was heartbreaking. I couldn’t believe, after all we had got through, this was how it was going to be. It took a long time to come to terms with that.”
Her mother died 10 months later. “Then I hit a wall.”
Later, a friend’s sister offered her a job in her boutique. “It was the best thing I could have done”, with supportive, tight-knit colleagues enveloping her. She has a few close friends and her sister Nora is “my rock”. She says two of Knuttel’s friends in particular have been very supportive.
He had a huge circle of acquaintances and friends. “It was incredible to see the outer circle drop off when he got sick. Because it happens immediately, as soon as the party is over.”
She says “people gravitated towards Graham”. She remembers a nurse saying “you’re very cheeky. And he said, Oh, I’m only getting started. But everybody who met him, even though he was being bold, laughed, thought he was funny. He was funny. He brought the party.”
Is she okay? “Ah yeah. I mean, I miss him desperately, for everything. He was fantastic company. He was brilliant on politics. He knew so much. He was so interested in other people. He was brilliant to travel with. And everywhere we went, somebody would come and start talking to us. He just seemed to attract these, sometimes very strange, sometimes fantastic, people. He was just one of those people, larger than life.”
The Graham Knuttel Retrospective (1954-2023) will be on at the Minerva Suite, RDS, Dublin 4 from September 19th-21st, 10am-5.30pm, admission free.
