was in Los Angeles in 1997 for the LA International Art Invitational Biennial. After the fourth or fifth person I'd just been introduced to insisted that if I saw nothing else while I was in town I had to see the work of Irish painter Patrick Graham, I took the hint and drove to the Jack Rutberg Gallery.

The first glimpse of the first painting triggered two equally urgent desires: One, to stay where I was for the rest of my life; the other, to race out the door, stop traffic on La Brea, and drag people in.

I wasn't surprised to learn that an inordinate number of Rutberg's sales of Graham's works are to other artists, and to psychiatrists and psychologists. Rutberg believes he knows why: "I'm certain that people in the healing arts - no accident that they, too, are called 'arts' - recognize the remarkable breadth of this work. For it to be so powerful, yet at the same time so intimate and fragile, it has to be operating on many levels."

"People find themselves crying in front of these paintings," Rutberg told me. "I end up doing a lot of therapy when I show Patrick."

Given how slowly and deliberately Graham works, the 1997 exhibition was momentous. It included 34 paintings, 32 of which comprised three "suites": The Lark in the Morning, The Blackbird Suite, and Somewhere Jerusalem. Many of these are included in an exhibition of Irish art that's been on international tour for the last couple of years. Rutberg notes that as the tour has progressed, it has become more and more apparent that Graham's work is its cornerstone.

Somewhere Jerusalem, 1996

Graham is in his late 50s; he's Dublin-based; he's got a bad back. He has little interest in promoting himself. As a child he was a drawing prodigy. At age 16 he was the youngest recipient of a scholarship to Ireland's National College of Art, where he received several awards and developed a reputation among his peers and professors as one of the country's most brilliant draftsman. At that time in Ireland, artistic achievement was defined by technique, not by the ability to convey ideas or emotions. Graham was disgusted with the uselessness of his extraordinary skill. He survived the bleak, ensuing years - marked by severe alcoholism and a stretch in a mental institution - and came back to art only after he'd been exposed to the paintings of Emil Nolde.

Graham is a contemporary Expressionist, Neo-Expressionist if you must, but as he himself points out, much Neo-Expressionism is reactionary and calculated. It is involved in a conversation with the art world, not the real world. Graham's conversation is with the submerged part of the real world - the iceberg's weighty anchor. When people cry in front of his paintings, I imagine it is with relief - relief that at last the unexpressable has been expressed.

He is often compared to Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer's paintings are three-dimensional not only in their literal, material sense but also in the use of perspective to suggest that history flows behind them to infinity. A Kiefer painting is history's bumpy touchdown; his images roar into the viewer's consciousness like a 747, in a billow of frigid airand pollution-tinged rain.

Graham's paintings, by contrast, though similarly three-dimensional in their material sense, look to have come into existence entirely on their surfaces - as though the canvas is skin and the image is bleeding into its delicate network like stigmata, or a violent bruise. Kiefer's ghosts are historical. Graham's are deeply personal.

Somewhere Jerusalem II, 1996

It's impossible not to link these works to the Irish psyche, specifically to the penchant for internal dialogue and internalized drama. Whether the oppressive force is said to originate with Queen Victoria, the miserable weather, or the potato-blight fungus, its consequence has been to drive Irish people inward. Again and again in Irish literature, one encounters heroic mental undertakings, undertaken alone. It's no accident that Irish writer James Joyce is credited with having raised stream-of-consciousness writing to its highest form in his 1922 Ulysses.

It's easy, too, to assume a link between the dark quality of Graham's work and his country's notoriously desperate history. But to assume too direct a link is a mistake, because, as with all Irish creative talent, the key is to look not over Graham's shoulder, at the damp, tawdry parlor of his youth, but to follow his thoughts outward, in the direction of his shining eyes. For the Irish are the Rumplestiltskins of the creative world - forever spinning pure gold out of moldy, dung-spattered straw. The "Irishness" of Graham's work is more correctly located in its bald candor, its lack of hubris, its unwillingness to make glossy amendments to the straightforward equation that is human life.

Further Studies: The Lark in the Morning VIII, 1996

When Graham speaks of getting to the truth in his paintings, I think he means getting to the pictures we have in our imaginations of what is true. So when he addresses the concept of "homeland" (the theme of the Somewhere Jerusalem suite), what he is after is the abstract version we carry in our dreams - a shimmering, brightly lit mirage signifying comfort, safety, and a sense of belonging. At the same time he acknowledges that this illusive property is small, enisled, and difficult to reach.

His work is full of internal signifiers. In Somewhere Jerusalem IX, instead of rendering roses perfectly as he well could have; he cut out photos of perfect roses and glued them to the canvas. Such "primitive" devices are not to call attention to himself but to induce an informal, unguarded frame of mind in both himself and the viewer. The paintings are comfortable and inviting, like the cluttered and well-lived-in house of a trusted (though perhaps troubled) friend. When you cross the threshold you let down your guard. Nothing denies access; the paintings don't in the least bit ingratiate themselves, yet they are extremely inviting.

Somewhere Jerusalem IX, 1996