An interview from Leeds Guide 2011
"I left school and did lots of crappy jobs. I was always of a kind of artistic bent but I never had the confidence to pursue it. I worked at a printers, left after six months, did a succession of crappy office jobs, and kept getting sacked because I was drawing on the invoices. I'd drift off and I'd be, 'oh what am I doing... oh shit...' and there was clowns and bouncing balls on the receipts and stuff. My mates kept badgering me to go to art college and I didn't know why they were saying that, because I thought, 'well I'm shit...'"I was born in Ireland, Irish Catholic, west of Ireland. My dad was a labourer, musician, flute player, and he played bagpipes as well, the Irish pipes. So there was lots of music in the house. We moved over here in 1960. Arrived in Armley, Tong Road, we were in this tiny little back-to-back, and I'd never seen so many bloody cars in my life, never seen as much grey and black and dirt. There was no grass; I got such a shock. There was no grass. And it was scary really, just very, very dark and grey.
"Finally I took three or four drawings to Bradford Art College, wrapped up inside a rubber band. Other people had a portfolio; I'd never seen a portfolio before and I was like 'fucking hell, I've got a rubber band and three drawings!' I'm nearly in tears in the queue, I'm gonna get absolutely laughed out of the building. I gradually unfolded the drawings, and this guy went 'yeah I like them, they're very good'... and cue joy, you know. So I had four years of Bradford Art College.
"And I went on a film/theatre/TV course, though I still didn't have the bollocks, the confidence, to say I'm an artist. When I left the tutor got me an exhibition down in Grantham. Really exciting, got my work framed, sold a few pictures. I thought that's it, wait for people to queue up to buy a painting. And nobody did! About six months of nobody knocking on my door, I went back to working on the buildings.
"In about 1980 I fell off the sixth floor of the dental hospital in Leeds when I was building it. This bar just went and I was just falling, watching people working as I was going past. I could see people building walls, and I'm thinking what a place to fucking die. I'd done nothing in my life and my last view is gonna be people putting one brick on top of another! I was going past and coming off bars and stuff, and I got to the fourth floor and my arm fell on the floor as I was going past, and I found a solid grip and hauled myself up and just sat on the floor. My mate was charging up the stairs going 'Mik! Mik! Mik!'. My feet were bouncing up and down on the concrete, just in total shock. I walked away.
"I then did a mini-tour of Europe; Greece, Germany, Austria, communist Yugoslavia, picked grapes in France, did Spain with the money I'd made. Spain was a blast. Then I came back to England and had a period in the wilderness, a bit of a mini-breakdown or something, I just got lost. I was signing on and that was all. I thought I've just got to do something, I'm gonna die if I don't. I said a little prayer, I said 'please god don't let me die', because I don't know what the fuck to do with myself.
"The next thing, I went out selling ties. I took an ironing board into the Merrion Centre, laid out all these ties and said 'COME ON LADIES! TWO FOR A QUID, LOOK AT THAT TENSION THERE! GET THAT ROUND YOUR MAN'S NECK!' and I made a living, just paying my rent, and it felt like I was alive again. Then one day I was in the laundrette with a mate of mine and I started to draw, I thought, 'shit I've just drawn somebody in pen. This is what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna make a living doing portraits. I thought I'm gonna go to Seacroft and see if I can sell some portraits. If I can make a living in Seacroft on a Friday night, I can make a living anywhere'. We got off the bus at Seacroft and went into this pub. There's a guy sitting opposite in commando pants and boots, I thought 'I'm gonna ask him if he wants a portrait doing'. He said yeah, so I drew him, showed him what I had, and he went 'it's good that'. Basically it went from there, I just wandered round bagging people, walking into people's faces. I used to get on people's tits. Everywhere. I'd walk into garages, funeral parlours, I stopped policemen in the street. There's been a mini exhibition of my paper bags recently in Armley at the I Love West Leeds shop.
"I've had my little band Mik Artistik's Ego Trip for five years now, we've done alright, we've done festivals and played with some really diverse people like Faust and John Cooper Clarke, and people like Mick Jones likes us, from The Clash. People think we're a really strange hybrid of all sorts of bollocks, a bit of comedy, a bit of performance art, a bit of pure punk rock, some funky stuff, some freestyling and nursery rhyme stuff, poetry and a load of improvisation. Keith Allen loves us.
"People have band T-shirts and Take That calendars and stuff, so I thought I'll just do a "Not a Calendar". I sell it and people say what is it? It looks like a calendar and it smells like a calendar, but it's not a calendar. What the fuck is it? It lasts a lifetime, you can change it three times a day or you can change it once a year. You can grow to love a page, it's up to you. It's given me a lot of pleasure, just walking around and unsettling people. Johnny Vegas bought five or six. "Not another Calendar" will soon be out and you be able to get them off my website.
"I was on Radio 4 Bespoken Word and one of my songs "Castaway" was used on the afternoon play. 400 people turned up at the Leeds Film Festival to see a documentary about me called "Who is Mik Artistik?". It's a lovely little film by a Dublin filmmaker called Jackie Jarvis.
"I've got in the National Portrait Gallery with one of my portraits. I had an exhibition of paintings Opus Gallery in Newcastle they were going at about £1100 each, big portraits, and you can see some of them on my website and Facebook site."