Guggi's career as a painter stands as one of the most remarkable success stories in contemporary Irish art, not least because the erstwhile Virgin Prune turned to painting relatively late, first picking up a brush in 1986. With a nod towards William Scott, Guggi has done and continues to an extraordinary amount with a stringently limited painterly vocabulary. He has enjoyed the goodwill of friends such as Bono, but goodwill can take you only so far, and the strength of Guggi's work is that it is extremely well made, consistently engaging and good to live with. His paintings feature in the Clarence Hotel, and more recently he has worked on a permanent installation for Beacon Court with John Rocha. In 2002 he enjoyed a sell-out show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York. Guggi also exhibits at the Solomon Gallery in Dublin.