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In the ancient heart of 13th-century town of Todi in Italy lies the Casa Dipinta (the painted house), a home that became a refuge for the Irish conceptual artist Brian O’Doherty and his wife, art historian Barbara Novak, amid political turmoil in the 1970s. O’Doherty died in 2022 but his home has become a museum and tribute to the imagination, experimentation, and Celtic origins of the artist.
The couple were motivated to explore Italy and later buy the house in the wake of the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry in 1972. After those events, Todi became place where they could escape from the anger and violence engulfing Northern Ireland – a space in which to create and rest. O’Doherty, a pacifist by nature, former doctor, teacher and art critic, as well as author of nonfiction texts on art, also decided that “there would be no more” and became “Patrick Ireland” in response to the killings – an alias that symbolised his roots (although, in 2008, he decided to go back to being O’Doherty).
In 1975, when the couple bought the house, a 19th-century residence in the centre, near Piazza del Popolo, O’Doherty began to paint the walls with acrylic colours, incorporating signs, memories and runic alphabets into works that are full of azures, sky blues, ochres, Titian reds and dreamy purples. The paintings became permanent installations, a testimony to art and rebirth.
Here, O’Doherty experimented with the use of a symbolic, magical language, composing the phrase “One, Here, Now” using the ancient Irish alphabet Ogham, which was in use in Ireland until the seventh century. “Ogham lines”, the written representation, or “letters”, of this ancient language, dominate the rooms on the lower floors, all repeating the phrase “One, Here, Now”.
And it is wonderful to walk around the three floors and enjoy its unique beauty: the whole house is immersed in colour, perspectives and visual games.
The first floor gives you a taste of what’s to come with huge, vivid works on every vertical surface. The kitchen, with its rough, earthy tiles and huge, exposed wooden roof beams, leads to the dining room, and together they evoke an ancient temple, or perhaps place where druids would practise ritual or magic. The kitchen appliances and cupboards almost seem like an afterthought among the bold slashes of colour.
Going up seven steps, also coloured with the shades of the rainbow, you get to the second floor. There, you can see the work “Trecento”, a reference and homage to the altarpieces of the early Renaissance: the thin threads fixed to the wall line up with the art to invite you to play with perspective as you view the altar, which O’Doherty painted with the three primary colours: red, yellow and blue.
You climb again, up steep steps. And the magic doesn’t end. In the bedroom, the bed’s headboard features a painted window, wide open on a quiet and serene world (there are many actual windows in the room, all with idyllic views).
All the spaces and rooms in the house – the stairs, the living room with the fireplace, the entrance, the kitchen – are frescoed with geometric grace. And everywhere there are threads of string lined up with the artworks, like perspective lines made real, asking you to shift your frame of reference.
The house is a mystical union of signs and languages, an invitation to play, a space that today would be called “immersive”, and that reminds us how we are all “One, Here, Now”.
For more information, visit coopculture.it
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