Drawn in by the careful patterns of a printmaker

VISUAL ARTS / Aidan Dunne: James McCreary: Retrospective 1973-2004, Graphic Studio Gallery until Feb 26 (01-6798021)

For many years the name James McCreary has been virtually synonymous with Dublin's Graphic Studio. No longer, perhaps, given that the long-term studio manager opted for early retirement last year, a move that presumably gave him more time to devote to the other side of his persona: James McCreary, printmaker. Hence the Graphic Studio Gallery's current mid-term retrospective of his work, featuring a representative selection of linocuts, etchings, lithographs and mezzotints dating from 1973 to 2004.

Born off Dublin's North Circular Road in 1944, McCreary attended technical college, where his art teacher recommended him to the Harry Clarke Stained Glass Studios. Although Clarke had long since died, the studios bearing his name continued to produce work based on his designs, something that McCreary found less than fulfilling after a relatively short time. He began to visit the Hugh Lane Gallery and attended night classes at the National College of Art and Design. A brief, unhappy foray to England was a prelude to following his father to work as a steel erector for Smith and Pearson.

His interest in art was developing apace, however, and he enrolled for classes at the Graphic Studio, then in Lower Mount Street. The discipline and technical nature of printmaking clearly suited him. It was, besides, a particularly lively time for the fledgling group, which involved a diverse pool of artists. Too diverse, perhaps. It wasn't quite the first item on the agenda, but eventually the printmakers got around to the split, resulting in two distinct graphic workshops in Dublin, the original Graphic Studio and the Blackchurch Print Studio. The former needed a workshop manager and McCreary fitted the bill.

There is a tentative quality to the earliest prints in the show, a certain looseness. Understandably so, given that McCreary was learning his craft. But by 1976 or so the work begins to have a greater crispness and technical authority. There is more density to each image. Boy with Tin Whistle also features what became an enduring preoccupation with pictorial ambiguity and pattern. And McCreary comes across as a careful observer, alert to telling visual details.

Things really come together in 1978, though, when he finally took the plunge and gave all his time to his work. One of his best ever prints, Girl St Stephen's Green, dates from that year. Perhaps influenced by classic Japanese woodblock prints, it's a quiet, even understated piece, but it is also audaciously composed and executed, and retains a lightness of touch that has since been progressively supplanted by a weightier emphasis on technique.

The received wisdom on printmakers is that they become obsessed by craft at the expense of art. That is not true of McCreary, but it does seem that he has been inexorably drawn to slow, considered, incremental techniques that preclude spontaneity, techniques unsuited to capturing the passing moment, the momentary look of things in a state of flux.

Such as, indeed, the girl with her back to us by the pond on St Stephen's Green, ripples spreading away from her. She is visualised chiefly in terms of the plaid pattern of her long coat. Time and again McCreary is drawn to pattern, in terms of fabric but also in terms of fields in the landscape and animal markings.

Pattern is often a kind of false surface, leading us into an image that bears no relation to the thing that features it. Figures in a Landscape actually adorn a pair of antique-looking bloomers hanging on a washing line. The varied textures and colours of fields on a headland make patterns that draw us in but lead us nowhere, so to speak. They simply emerge from the haphazard configuration of different owners and uses. Any representations they suggest are incidental and misleading.

Jacques Lacan said that painting is designed to trap our gaze, that it has the nature of a lure. It is not so much about showing us something as interposing something between ourselves and what lies beyond it. One of the groups of works McCreary is best known for as a printmaker are of fishing lures, boldly coloured artefacts designed to attract fish. In a series of beautiful mezzotints, these bright decoys materialise out of the lush, inky blackness of the water. They are both attractive and slightly ridiculous in that they are unrealistic, cartoon-like.

In the catalogue, Ciaran Benson observes a recurrent interest in "the simultaneous forces of psychological attraction and repulsion" in these and other of McCreary's prints.

There is perhaps also the abiding implication that what is attractive, or perhaps excessively attractive, bright and flashy, is also dangerous. We are put in the position of the fish in the mezzotints of lures, and the lures are designed to entice, fool and catch the fish. Images, such as those printed onto or woven into garments, are designed to divert or mislead, they are never what they seem.

All this may sound fairly dark and pessimistic, but McCreary is fond of humour, and expressly sets out to be humorous in both his imagery and his punning titles. Even the puns, though, visual and verbal, point to an ambiguity about things. In a strange, revealing insight into the memories and feelings that underlie the lure images, he recalls his being afraid, as a child, to join his father swimming in the waters of Dublin Bay at the Bull Wall. Looking back as an adult on his reluctance to take the plunge, he wonders whether there was "a great fish lurking off the Poolbeg Lighthouse, waiting for a small boy to enter the water . . ."

It's a light-hearted meditation, but it evokes the imaginative terrors of childhood and an exceptional wariness of the world outside. Placed alongside his images of scarecrows (another staple) and the other allusions to the deceptiveness of surface images, the picture of fascination and fear begins to emerge. One thinks that, apart altogether from his studies of bathers, lures, and bodies of water, McCreary must be intrigued by the mystery of what lies beneath the surface, or behind the image.

But does his innate caution and wariness prevent him, now as then, taking the plunge?