Art as therapy bears fruit in Limerick

Reviewed:

Lundbeck Art Initiative, Hunt Museum, Limerick, October 16th-19th (061-312833)

Mick O'Dea: Paintings, 2001, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until October 18th (01-6617286)

Colin Crotty: Land, Fire, Figure, Paul Kane Gallery, Dublin, until October 26th (01-6703141)

Cora Cummins and Naomi Sex, Original Print Gallery, Dublin, until October 28th (01-6773657)

The Lundbeck Art Initiative - take out the word art and it sounds like a thriller by Robert Ludlum - is an annual series of art exhibitions and competitions open to people resident in or attending psychiatric hospitals. In that context, the work that ends up on show comes under the heading of therapy, initiated and guided by therapists. It would be unfair and unrealistic to expect it to reach a professional level, but reasonable enough to have some expectations of it all the same; certainly, that it match the level of an amateur show.

Opening the second Dublin exhibition at the Office of Public Works on St Stephen's Green last week, Dr Patricia Noone alluded to some of the actual and potential objections to showing the work. It had been suggested, she said, that because it was made in a private context, exhibiting it publicly was inappropriate. She disagreed. Mental illness, she said, is just that: an illness. It can affect anyone and does affect many of us. Banishing the paintings was merely to stigmatise it.

So, although it is not particularly the point of the exercise, it is worth mentioning that both of the Dublin regional shows, particularly the second, threw up some impressive work. Peter Brown's moody, cinematic rendering of The James Brothers, John Rice's Garden Of Winter (with echoes of Jack B Yeats and Eithne Jordan), David Murphy's economically designed Sky Flowers, Robert Corbett's Street With No Name, Anthony Lynch's colour composition Whatever and David Lennon's beautiful, restrained batik Cosmos were among the many creditable pieces that showed engagement with the materials and suggested promise. All the evidence suggests that the benefits of art as therapy, and of exhibition and competition, far outweigh any potential drawbacks. The final exhibition of the series this year opens on Monday, at the Hunt Museum in Limerick, and is on show throughout the week.

Mick O'Dea's work at the Ashford Gallery is concerned with the human face and body, mingling clothed portrait studies with nudes from, mostly, the life room at Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Connecticut. You could say the show consists of the evidence of a series of lively, one-to-one co-operative confrontations between artist and models.

For the most part, O'Dea emphasises the informality of the artist-model exchange, preferring a casual level of finish, refraining from tidying up his images, roughly painting over established outlines, for example, letting us clearly see the approximations, hesitancies and revisions.

He opted to use acrylic paint throughout. Presumably, the primary advantage of acrylic is that it is fast-drying and suits the conspicuous pace of his method. It can also be used thinly or thickly, depending on the degree of dilution. With one or two exceptions, the most finished pieces are from the life room.

The main disadvantage of acrylic, compared with oil, is its lack of tonal and chromatic richness and subtlety. It is a fairly unforgiving medium, and a fairly lifeless one. So it was brave of O'Dea to thrust himself into the exposed position of making images directly of sitters in this way.

What comes through is the energy of the engagement. In the portraits, what is worked for is the likeness, so usually everything is concentrated on the faces, and there are some good, strong heads, of Camille, of Dylan and Willie. Two flamboyant studies of Camille veer off, deliberately, into theatricality, and the study of Willie is one of the most carefully finished pieces in the show.

Elsewhere, the odd fuzziness of the treatment of the figures, as though the fabric is unravelling en masse, can tell against the overall images in both portraits and nudes, but then part of O'Dea's rationale is the immediacy of the encounter, and these are vibrant, immediate works.

Colin Crotty is a young artist best known for his elliptical, meditative approach to painting the figure in subdued, atmospheric compositions with a good sense of space.

His new series of work, at the Paul Kane Gallery, follows a residency at Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Co Mayo, and it sees him, appropriately enough, becoming more engaged with the landscape. As he puts it, the paintings are concerned with atmospheric changes. They comprise perhaps his most accomplished work to date, in that they are intelligently and tastefully made.

Abstracted evocations of the landscape, they hinge on the horizon line and are enlivened by light filtering through cloud and moisture. There are no explicitly stated figures as such, but the vertical forms that cut through the horizontal suggest an emblematic figurative presence.

This compositional strategy, however - the palette of muted greys and the smooth surface textures - suggests, rightly or wrongly, the influence of Hughie O'Donoghue (in work largely inspired by the same part of the country) to an extent that is almost obtrusive.

At the Original Print Gallery, works by Cora Cummins and Naomi Sex complement each other nicely.

On the face of it, there is a straightforward contrast between the former's gentle, minimal rural landscapes and the latter's bustling scenes of urban development.

In fact, Sex's work, while ostensibly exploring the rather brutal subject of the urban landscape in the remaking, is fairly gentle as well. She finds a wealth of idiosyncratic character and detail in the jumble of packed city buildings. So her account of the city is of a sympathetic and human place - and even though she depicts buildings, not people, there is something almost Dickensian in her engaging evocation of the bustling environment.

Cummins's unpeopled vistas, of bare hillsides or sand dunes colonised by clumps of grass, have an attractively stylised quality, as though she is creating scenes of the greatest possible emptiness, the better to encourage our imaginative habitation of them.