This hardback book is no. 27 in Gandon Editions' PROFILES series on Irish artists, featuring the painter Michael Cullen.

"For a painter who is by and large concentrated on the most primitive passions - or rather those, like sex, least amen­able to being civilised - Cullen is devoted to the pleasures of art for its own sake, or rather as a moral alternative to chaos. His work is richly veined with allusions, and he celebrates them in variations of great improvisational skill and ingenuity.

He has also opened himself to the beauty of existing things, not least the thingness of paint. There is often in his work now, especially in his use of pure white, a kind of glorying in the substance, which produces an atmosphere that is at once dense yet airy, sun-struck yet cool, even skin-pricklingly cold, as refreshing as ice-cream. A late deliciousness is one of the surprises of Cullen's development as a painter." (Brian Lynch)