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PATRICK HICKEY had - through his work as an artist, a lecturer, an architect, a designer, and a founder of modern art graphics in Ireland - perhaps more influence on the direction of art and design in Ireland than any of his contemporaries.
Born in India in 1927, he graduated as an architect from University College, Dublin, and having spent time in Urbino in Italy returned to Ireland, fired up with enthusiasm for graphics, to found the Graphic Studio Dublin in 1962.
The original Graphic Studio was located down a flight of steps in the basement area of a fine Georgian terraced street. Now housing expensive offices, the building was then a rather seedy place of cheap flats and unpainted hallways. It was quite an unsuitable place for a thriving print studio since it was too small. The studio was in what had been the kitchens of the original house - and its stone floors were steady under the heavy printing presses.
It was very much the place to be in the 1960s and 1970s. Hickey presided, and when I first knew him in the late 1960s he was a big, vigorous, red- headed man, possessed of endless patience and the true teacher's ability to make one feel that there was merit in even the most awful scrawl. A stream of artists and would-be artists came and went: many now famous professional artists went through the "Graphic" and spent hours learning hand-printing of etchings and lithographs and the art of sitting on the high stools chatting and drinking cups of tea.
We even had a member of the staff of the British Embassy, a would- be artist or spy, who knows? He attended in the early 1970s and, when he was given 24 hours to leave the...