Hats off to Irene

Closer inspection reveals a mannequin sitting inside it and a big sign on top announcing ‘Brookfield Ostrich Farm: Home of the Yellow Hat Tribe Art Gallery”

This wacky, rather surreal display perfectly sums up artist Irene Tyack and the paintings that have won her what verges on cult status.

The car, which is brought down from the field at the end of each day, then driven up the following morning, seems to have become part of the local landscape.

“People ring to say ‘The car’s not there today, are you all right’?” Irene said.

Dressed in colourful clothing, running her hands through her mass of dark, curly hair and talking nineteen to the dozen, she is a human whirlwind.

Her eyes are so dark brown they are almost black, a legacy of the Romanian gypsy blood in her family, and she is rarely still for more than 30 seconds at a time.

Featuring the Yellow Hat Tribe, an imaginary group of people who sprang, fully-formed from her head one day, Irene’s paintings are vibrant, bursting with colour, energy and humour.

Her painting career began ten years ago after she doodled on the envelope of an electricity bill she couldn’t afford to pay and found herself inventing the Tribe characters.

“I was so low when I first drew them, but those little people, they were the start of a new life. It’s as if somebody gave them to me,” she said simply.

A decade on, there are keen collectors of her paintings around the world and she has a five-year waiting list on commissions.

She told me: “People love my paintings. I can say that now, but I used to feel very humble when anyone came in and bought anything.

“I started painting, not because I thought someone would buy them, but because I wanted to,” she added.

But will we punters ever get to see any of those Tribe people’s faces, which are always obscured by their yellow hats?

“Oh, I may do something like that for my 60th birthday next year, you’ll have to wait and see,” she teased.

I quiz her further about her Yellow Hat gang. How many of them are there and what country do they come from? Does she work from photographs or other material?

“It is a very large tribe. In my mind they live where there is sunshine and they are all related to each other,” she explained.

“I paint what’s in my head, that’s all. It comes out as really happy pictures that people tell me they never get fed up of looking at,” she added.

Her studio doubles as her gallery and she stands at her easel for anything up to ten hours a day. “People love coming here and watching me paint,” she said.

Having an audience obviously doesn’t slow her down, since she has completed around 500 original works in the past decade.

These days, the larger original canvases command as much as £20,000, while prints cost anything from £55-£450 and are always limited edition.

As the cult of the Yellow Hat Tribe grows, she has extended into merchandise with mugs, tea towels, aprons, trays, coasters and greetings cards and this is an area she plans to expand.

In terms of family, as the mother of six children — three boys and three girls — she has accumulated 18 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. “My kids thought ‘what on earth is she up to?’”, she says of when she started painting commercially ‘But their houses are all full of my paintings now.”

Her own favourite canvas is Masterpiece, the original hanging in pride of place in her gallery. It depicts an orchestra of Yellow Hat Tribe people led by a conductor who has a bottle of Champagne and glass hidden behind his chair.

“I painted it through many long nights when Vince would get out of bed, sit on the arm of the sofa watching me and ask: ‘Haven’t you finished that masterpiece yet?’ “So that’s what I called it,” she chuckled.

Vince Tyack is her third husband — asked about her first marriage, which lasted 13 years and produced five of her six children, she shook her head “Let’s just say it wasn’t good.”

Then followed a 14-year marriage to her second husband, during which time her youngest child Kate was born.

When she met Vince 14 years ago she was working as a waitress in her local pub.

“He was really brown because he had just come back from Africa. He made me laugh then and he still does now,” she said.

In fact, she credits his fascinating tales of his travels in the sub-continent and the desert as being the inspiration behind the Yellow Hat Tribe.

As proprietor of the only ostrich farm in the Cotswolds, Vince is clearly no stranger to doing things differently.

They married in September, 2006, with a marquee in the garden and a wedding cake covered in pictures of ostriches and Yellow Hat Tribe people.

Her work has brought her widespread acclaim and she has grown in confidence as the years have gone by.

“I am getting bolder with my painting. I still find it really exciting because I can’t wait to get the ideas out of my head and onto canvas,” she explained.

One of the highlights of her career so far was in 2004, when she was invited to exhibit with leading artist Beryl Cook, who, like Irene is self-taught and uses much humour in her work.

And this autumn she unveils a large number of new paintings at her Brookfield Farm gallery that will run for three weeks from the end of November.

“This new exhibition is different, it is more peaceful with lots of blues, lilacs and purples,” she revealed.

Despite the fact that her Tribe seem to be from exotic lands where there are deserts and palm trees, she rarely ventures outside the UK.

“I am not the best person to go travelling. I worry myself sick if I go up in an aeroplane. So I travel in my head instead,” she laughed.

Vince did manage to persuade her to go to Mauritius for their honeymoon and she based her picture, Cane Cutters, on what she saw there, as always putting her own humorous slant on things.

“I view life, I realise now, in a slightly different way and it doesn’t matter whether I am on a beach or in a supermarket,” she pointed out.

“I always see the funny side of things, so don’t ever go to a funeral with me,” she giggled.

Born in the depths of the Herefordshire countryside, she grew up in abject poverty with no running water or electricity.

“But I was really happy, even though we had nothing. We lived in tied cottages and ended up moving about 18 times,” she remembered.

Didn’t she mind having to move schools, make new friends?

“Why?” She asked, genuinely surprised. “I loved always being the new girl”.

It is easy to imagine that it was this experience of constantly coming into situations as an outsider that gave her the gift of being able to see life in a slightly different way.

As I leave, past that bright yellow car again, I notice the mannequin is in the passenger, rather than the driver’s seat, and speculate that it must be because they need to drive the car up and down each day.

Then I ask myself why on earth I’m wondering about that. But then, that’s Irene Tyack for you — she sets you off thinking about the strangest things.

Irene’s autumn exhibition runs at Brookfield Ostrich Farm from November 28 until December 21, 2008. For more information about Irene and the Yellow Hat Tribe, visit www.theyellowhat-tribe.com