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Patrick Hickey was born in 1927 in British India. He went to school in England and then studied architecture at University College Dublin where he qualified in 1954. He worked for Michael Scott for a number of years from 1956 on. He studied etching and lithography at the Scuola del Libro in Urbino, Italy from 1957-58 on an Italian State Scholarship.
In 1962 he started a print studio with Anne Yeats, Liam Miller, Leslie McWeeney and Elizabeth Rivers. Initially for teaching graphics, possibly re-introducing etching and lithography to Irish art. They started the school in a basement flat in Upper Mount Street, Dublin, which then became The Graphic Studio.
Patrick Hickey had his first solo exhibition in the Dawson Gallery in 1961. Following over the years, with a number of one-man shows at the Taylor; several group shows such as the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and International Biennales including Paris, Cracow and San Paolo. He participated in these largely as a painter.
"These Biennales and Triennales seem to appeal to the worst in artists - they are largely about getting a reputation; when reputation is about the last thing a serious artist should aim for. I am put in mind of the charming Greek word for newspaper: ephemerides - ephemeral - and feel it should be applied to these international style exhibitions."
After teaching in the School of Architecture at UCD for a number of years, he undertook an Arts degree in 1980-84, studying the History of Art and Italian. He was Head of Painting, in the Fine Art faculty at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin from 1986-90.
He designed the new bank notes for Ireland in 1973-75 as part of a team and was commissioned to design some Irish postage stamps. He worked right up to the end of his life and saw his illness as a challenge to be met and accepted. Having lived with Parkinson's disease since 1974, he never let it be an issue to himself or anyone else and died peacefully at his home with his family around him in October 1998.
"The difference between drawing and painting lies in the intention. Why you are doing it. I think if you are doing a drawing, you are actually breaking down, rather than building up. You're breaking down forms to find out what there is there, and the painting is then a building up on canvas, of what you found to be there. I know that there are plenty of drawings, which are not this, but I think that, fundamentally, they are pencil drawings."
Patrick Hickey
From an interview with Marianne Hartigan, Irish Arts Review, vol.3, no.1, 1986