A great late period

THERE have been a number of important McSweeney exhibitions in the past few years, notably the large one shared with Conor Fallon which was seen last year at the RHA Gallery and later in Sligo. The Galway exhibition contains some pictures which have, in fact, been seen before, but much of the work is new.

Recently McSweeney has taken to "painting big" - in part a necessary move in view of the RHA's formidable open spaces, but also perhaps in reaction against the identification of him as a painter who fights shy of large scale compositions. It probably also reflects the need to cope with the panoramic spaces of his stretch of the Sligo coastline, with its high skies, wide vistas and the omnipresent Atlantic. Certainly the Galway exhibition contains a number of pictures measuring 48 by 66 inches, or 58 by 76 sizeable by most Irish standards.

These are not, by and large, the most convincing or successful, since McSweeney's pictorial architecture is not his strongest quality. Broadly speaking, he is Romantic and expressionist rather than constructivist or postCubist. Yet, after all, the "gestural" American generation which plainly influenced him took to big canvases like ducks to a muddy pond, so it seems only a matter of time before his~~ partly landscape, partly abstract expressionist style takes wing in the larger formats.

As it is, some of these works have a certain transitional look, but they contain passages of superb and self confident painting. Early Spring, for example, boils with energy as well as the characteristic swells of colour Yellow Ochre Bog is a daring chromatic symphony.

It continues to puzzle me how McSweeney is still spoken of as an artist who repeats him self a good deal and is inhibited and narrow in his themes. In fact, he seems almost endlessly inventive and his subject matter - bog pools, shorelines, trees, water in rest or in motion is made to yield a striking range of moods and metamorphoses. In Autu~mn Shoreline the warm tones glow like a sunlit autumnal landscape, while in the superb Pools the "layered" composition is built up in precisely the opposite colour range - blues, greens and flecks of white. Early Spring Pools is a masterpiece.

As with a number of Irish artists - Jack Yeats, of course, is the outstanding example, but there have been others - his best and most creative period has come relatively late. Perhaps McSweeney's relative isolation from Dublin art politics and his quiet obduracy in pursuing his own road have been an insulation against much topical ephemera, the kind of thing which has pushed many talented people off balance; he has had the consistent courage to be himself and nobody else. Ultimately, this has paid off, richly and undeniably, and he now stands among the very best living Irish painters.