So, if you had to describe yourself to somebody, what would you say? Who is Stiofán Grego?

Let me think … Stiofán Grego is an emotional dreamer who likes to party. I am very grounded, but I have a hedonistic side as well. I am a caring person and I love people, I want to get to know them. I'm always asking questions, trying to find answers. I would also describe myself as somebody who feels quite fortunate to be alive at this particular moment in time. 

Why is that? 

Because of everything that's happening right now, and because of the opportunities and ideas that I get from it. We live in an amazing world at the moment; it has never been better, you know? Of course, there's a lot of shit going on, but there was when Genghis Khan was running around; people just didn't tell each other about it. I don't buy into the sort of paranoia and sadness that is quite easy to succumb to at the moment. And I'm so happy I'm living in Palma de Mallorca now. It's something that I never imagined happening in my life before. 

Why did you move to Palma?

For the last couple of years, we had been thinking of broadening our horizons beyond Helsinki. I have nothing bad to say about Helsinki or Finland in general – it's a cool place to live – but both of us, my wife and I, had outgrown the sort of lifestyle that was there, and we wanted a bit more. We have been together for quite some time now, but we only got married last year and we came to Palma for our honeymoon. We were supposed to go to Ibiza for two weeks for a party, then Olga talked me into going to a yoga festival. I had never done yoga before; I had problems spelling it! So, we came here for a week and we fell in love with the city. I immediately felt a really good energy … all the art I saw around the place! From general graffiti on walls to all those amazing art galleries. I can't really explain it, but there is a creative energy and the light is simply fantastic. We haven't left here since we arrived, but I know when we go back to Finland or Belfast at some stage it will still be grey and dark; completely different from Mallorca. So, we wanted more opportunities, and coupled with what I just said about the island, it seemed to tick all the boxes.

Helsinki is a very cool place, but it is quite conservative; I could only reach so far. I could not push my head up too much, and Belfast can be quite similar in a way. We wanted to step beyond that, not to be thinking about other people’s opinions. Being from Belfast I have a tendency not to care what other people think. I don't care if somebody likes or doesn't like my art. That's not the point for me, you know? Obviously, it's a lot better commercially if somebody likes it (laughs) but at the same time it's not what I'm looking for. Us people from Ireland – and especially from Belfast – we have an honest way of talking about things. I usually get straight to the point, not only with my opinions but also in my art. 

We have children, too and we wanted something more for them, so career-wise, art-wise and family-wise, Palma seems to have become the centre of the world for us. But if I have to tell the truth, we decided to move to Palma while we were sitting on our balcony during our honeymoon. Olga said, “You know, that's a cute little city,” and as soon as she said that, I knew we were going to live here. (smiles)

Before that, you left Belfast to live in Helsinki … Yes I did. Why did I move? For love, basically.

I booked a one-way ticket and didn’t go back to Belfast for five years. I didn't tell anybody I was going. I told my employer that I was going on holiday for a week, which was a complete lie – I thought that's what you're supposed to do with employers. (laughs)

So, I moved to Helsinki and I didn't tell my family or anyone. I remember speaking to my dad about six or seven weeks after I left. He asked why I hadn't come and seen him since I came back. I said, well, I haven't come back. 

Tell me more about those early years in Belfast … Well, when I was in Belfast, I wasn't painting at all; I hadn't even discovered that yet. I had a lot of jobs, in marketing and things like that. I went to university when I was younger, but I hated it. 

What did you study? I started studying computer science, but I just didn't like it at all, it just didn't appeal to me. Therefore, I didn't bother doing much when I was there (laughs). After a year and a half I knew it was wasn't going to be right for me, so I left. I went to London for about eight months when I was twenty years old, and I worked for a record label there, selling T-shirts at raves and things. I took a course in music business management and then, when I came back to Belfast, I started DJing. Eventually, I ended up running a club brand, a nightclub in Belfast called Kontact … boy, did we have a lot of fun! We threw some really nice underground parties and booked many DJs from around the UK.

I had always had this interest in techno music and also clubbing in general. It wasn't about the social side of things, or the antisocial side. For me, and for most people I met, it was specifically about the music. Belfast was a great place for that sort of scene, you know? Not only because of our history there, but also because of all those social issues we had for many, many years. The dance music scene in Belfast was a very open and playful area where you could meet people from different sides of the wall.

So, would you say that you helped to create a new community where Catholics and Protestants were able to share the same passion?  

I remember that at some of the first raves I went to, it was also the first time I ever met a Protestant. I come from the Irish-Catholic side of my family, and Belfast during the conflict was very complicated. The city centre was always closed in the evenings, so there was no city life as you would find in any other large European city. There was no nightlife, and nobody was living there. Protestants would socialise in their own areas and Catholics would do the same in theirs, but they would stay entirely separated.

So, when house music came along, Catholics and Protestants ended up meeting at illegal raves, obviously taking drugs and stuff like that. But again, for many people it was the first time they had actually met someone from the other side. You had the same sort of reason to be there, and that broke down those sectarian walls. So, music scenes like house music and techno music have suddenly allowed Belfast to leave politics at the door.

And in Helsinki? 

Well, when I moved to Helsinki, I started working with some local artists and producers. Then we started the Kontact record label, and we found ourselves promoting other people's

music and releasing some records. At that stage, I was making my own music, mostly techno and a lot of minimal stuff. But at some point I found that I had enough. I simply lost interest in techno and so I stepped away from that. Together with a friend from Romania, we started making more minimal music and finally created a whole album of that, and I ended up having my own radio show on a national radio station called Basso Radio. 

A show about music, dare I guess? Well, basically, rather than talking about techno for two hours we had the idea of getting a variety of artists on to the show to talk about their work. We had artists ranging from photographers and visual artists to dance performers and musicians. It was quite cool and easy to do, because when you get an artist on to talk about themselves and their work, they love doing that. Right. To me, it was such a great opportunity to meet and be inspired by different artists, especially visual ones, and to understand the process of what they go through when they create.

Suddenly, I felt I had something else to express, and music wasn't doing that for me anymore.

Do you think that was maybe because in Helsinki the social purpose of creating a community was missing?

I'm not sure. I've never thought about it like that, to be honest. But I started missing the emotion in my music; there was nothing special anymore, and I felt like it was sounding very much like everything else.

So, then you found that you were more interested in painting?

Yes, it was actually quite funny how I then transgressed to a more visual thing. I remember one day my daughter was drawing a little face on an Ikea napkin at home in Helsinki, a little face with a felt-tip pen, and she left it there on the kitchen counter. I drew something beside it and I somehow liked the feeling of it. There was something about Ikea and napkins …

(laughs), just the way the felt-tip pen moved and sunk in and left this permanent mark on something that we throw away. I was going through a particular moment in my life back then, and I started writing on these Ikea napkins and drawing sort of primitive stickmen characters. Broken poetry on a napkin. So, I started posting them on Instagram.

Are they still there? Yeah, people really liked them and started interacting with them, with me. Because it was me, you know? It was my voice; not somebody else's, but mine, and it didn't sound like anybody else's voice either. I kept drawing on those napkins for about a year – I still have them all. I started progressing and further developing them. They're about sex and love and drugs, good times and bad times, breaking up and making up. Spontaneous thoughts, really. A lot of my emotions at that time were very thought through, and this wasn't. It was the beginning of something new.

When you look around in this world it feels like everything has been done already, but there are still things at least I haven't done yet. That is why I try not to look at other artists, because whatever comes from my own thoughts and feelings is my own creativity. Even if we are all influenced by other people, I try to be original. 

But who do you admire? I have certain things I like, but I don't follow any other artists. I really try to avoid that, avoid the influence from outside. There are people like George Condo – he is a genius – and obviously Jean-Michel Basquiat; stuff like that. Their work is beautiful. Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin … those pop up when I think of favourite artists.

When I look at other painters' art, I see a lot of anger: like, for example, in Basquiat’s “Irony of a Negro Policeman”. I'm not Black American and I can't comment or make that influence me in any way. I like the imagery, it's cool, you know? But it’s a political statement I don't understand because I don't have that sort of background. 

I'm from Belfast and there's a lot of struggle in the back of my mind, of course, but I am really not interested in all that. What attracts us as humans is not negativity. I haven't reached that point where I feel I want to be negative and that something I'm painting should also be. When I paint, I am just asking a question through my paintings. For example, I have made one painting called “Citizen Prefix”. It has to do with what has been happening in the United States around Black Lives Matter. I didn't want to do some sort of civil rights painting around racism, because it is not my place; I am not experiencing it. So, I tried to put the question out there for people, to ask what is an American? What is a citizen? Why would you call somebody a Black American, an Irish American, a Hispanic American or whatever? So, I'm not making a statement about something, I'm just asking a question, and it is: “Have you asked yourself this question?” I don't have anything argumentative to say against anybody's point of view; it's entirely up to them what they think about something. Hopefully, all this leads to a dialogue in which I am able to empathise with them and understand where they come from, which might give me a new understanding, too.

So you try to give people a starting point for them to understand where their own belief systems come from?

Exactly. We live in a world right now where everybody is quite comfortable having opinionated arguments based only on information from the internet, without actually knowing and experiencing these issues or being able to even remotely understand other people’s situations. 

How would you describe your art? There's not a real label for it. I would say it's simply raw emotion. I do like primitivism and I like to combine words and imagery together.

I don't want my paintings to be simply decoration. That's not what I'm about. I'm not interested in making beautiful pictures. I'm interested in expressing my emotion at that time, whatever it is. I have had the experience where people have said to me that this means this or that to them, or they see this and that, and so then it becomes a conversation rather than me telling them what this is supposed to be. If they buy a piece, it is usually because it means something to them.

It doesn't need to be a beautiful face or the perfect hand or anything like that, because every hand is different and every face is different. We've evolved with a set of emotions; all our faces are different, but we can relate to emotions when we see them because they are basically the same.

There are always spelling mistakes in my work, that’s just the way I speak. When I say “responsibility”, it's rosponsibility with an o – that's my accent, the way I was brought up in Belfast. So, for example, when I wrote it in “Bra”, one of my paintings, I thought, “Oh shit, I've spelled that wrong.” But I kind of liked it and I just left it there because it was a mistake, and mistakes are what our lives are made of. The reason that you and me are having this conversation here and now is because we made a shitload of mistakes in our lives which brought us to this point. But we try and cover them up and don't talk about them or don't reveal that those mistakes are there. So that’s why in all my paintings you will see the process underneath. It’s a way of being honest.

What kind of techniques do you usually use? I use a lot of acrylic oil and I love using oil bars on canvas. 

Almost like children at school ... Yeah, completely like a kid at school; that's a really good point you're bringing up. To me, children are so honest in what they do. When you see a child draw a picture, they're just doing it the way they think; they don't care about opinions. So I guess I identify  that sort of childlike imagery. I like the primitive side of it, it is super fun.

You seem to be such a happy soul, but when I see your paintings, I also see very strong emotions. Do you think that maybe you are so happy on the outside because you get to release your emotions through your art?

Yes, definitely. Once I have painted something, it's out, it's done. I don't have to think about it anymore. It's like a release; the frustration is gone and I don't need to ask that question again.

It's like when you have a certain emotion. Maybe you haven't told the person that

you love exactly how you feel about them for years, and then you get the opportunity. Once you tell them, they know and you can walk away, you can leave it. You've said it, they know how you feel, that's it. Then it's up to them. I feel the same when I finish a painting. 

Do you still feel that there is some of your childhood in Belfast, some of your experiences, in your art?

Yes, of course it's there. There's an energy from Belfast in my art and I think it will always be there. It is like a soft aggressiveness. I was born and brought up in Belfast, I lived through the Irish Troubles, and I have seen and experienced a lot of bad stuff. But I still had a brilliant childhood (laughs). I have witnessed real bad violence with people being killed in front of me. Soldiers were patrolling the streets but we just played there in the middle of all of this. My childhood was good, in spite of all that. I grew up in West Belfast, in Ballymurphy, and I remember playing in bombed-out houses. We didn't play cops and robbers like other kids; we played IRA men and Brits (laughs). But growing up in Belfast also taught me not to be afraid of saying something, of being myself, and that will always come through.

My family have always had a good sense of humour. That was a way of dealing with the situation – to look at the comedic side of things. There's a darkness, but there is also the ability to get on with it and normalise it. 

What are your next projects? The Limitless Exhibition in Tallinn, Estonia, is on now, and I have been asked to be part of Loba Gallery, which is where the exhibition is being held. The organisers are Helsinki based and so I will also have a solo exhibition coming up there. Other projects with them involve exhibitions in Athens and Chicago. We will be doing something in Mallorca as well next year.

What is your passion?

Well, of course my family and my wife (smiles). I don't really have any materialistic passion or hobby. My passion is just asking questions, you know? I really like asking questions.

What makes you angry?

Jazz music. (Laughs) It’s something I just don't understand. But seriously, at the moment, people forcing their beliefs based on somebody else's opinion makes me uncomfortable.

I'm against using expressions like “I think” and “I believe”. It shows that you're not sure about something. But at the same time you want others to believe in what you think. Also, it seems to be that people who are the biggest exponents of free speech are the most offended when somebody says something freely back. 

And finally … what makes you smile? My wife. Olga makes me smile every morning. (smiles).