One Day

Solomon Fine Art@15 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin Mon-Sat 10am-5.30pm, Sun noon-6pm Ends Mar 10 solomongallery.com 086-8142380

When art school curricula were given a makeover in the late 1960s, one of the first things to go was the centrality of the life room and life drawing. But life drawing never disappeared, and in recent years it’s made an extraordinary comeback as artists rediscover the importance of working from life.

As James Hanley notes in an introduction to One Day, he himself gave up life drawing for some years and then, in 2003, returned to it in Thursday afternoon sessions at the RHA from which he has assembled, as he puts it, a “body” of work from the life room. Everything in the show was completed within the space of that one day a week – “I never tweak or improve after the fact.”

Hanley is perhaps best known as a portrait painter, and his life drawings and paintings are, in a sense, as Lucien Freud titled many of his paintings, naked portraits.

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Barrie Cooke Hamilton Gallery, Sligo 071-9143686