The artist as witness

Elizabeth Cope is best known as a painter of bright, colourful pictures. She makes spontaneous, spirited still lifes, views of interiors, animals, portraits, domesticated landscapes. A decorative painter, you might say. That sounds almost disparaging but it shouldn't. The world's certainly a better place for the existence of good decorative artists. After all Matisse is a decorative painter and, it must be acknowledged, Cope's style owes a great deal to Matisse and to another decorative artist par excellence, Raoul Dufy.

Her Solomon Gallery show, just ending, gives a fair idea of this side of her work. It's a lively mix of pictures, spiced up with a number of fleshy nudes, including a more or less life-sized Eve who greets - and may startle - you on the stairs. She has experimented with cut-out formats, most dramatically in a big double portrait of a woman identified only as Brenda.

You do have a chance to see quite another side to Cope, though. She is one of two exhibitors in Images from Central America, at Arthouse in Temple Bar, Dublin, until Friday July 3rd and later at other venues in Ireland. Her paintings hang alongside the black-and-white photographs of David Stephenson.

A few years ago, inspired by the war artist scheme in Britain, she persuaded Trocaire to let her travel to Somalia under its auspices, as artist-in-residence. This was something quite new and it was brave and imaginative of Trocaire to respond. In the event she made two trips to Somalia and produced a striking body of work. Then last year she set off for Central America, to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, again with Trocaire. She brought an enormous role of prepared artist's linen and a supply of paint, and she worked on the hoof. In a way, that's nothing new for her: she's always had a penchant for impromptu working arrangements.

The rationale for Stephenson's assignment is clear enough and his photographs are primarily a sympathetic record of people encountered and the world they inhabit, from the street children in a shelter in Tegucigalpa, to the women in the vast Chiquita banana factory or the cane cutters in the harsh environment of the sugar plantations. The images sit comfortably in the tradition of documentary photography.

Cope's role is more difficult to define but really she too was merely documenting what she encountered. She painted on the spot, resisting any temptation to revise things later in the studio and as a result the pictures have a roughness and immediacy about them. Many of them looked hurried. She exhibits them with their rough edges, unembellished, augmented only by a brief descriptive commentary.

She responds with a painter's eye to a new environment, an eye that is hungry for detail, like her patient visual description of a cluttered electricity pole, or straightforward landscapes like her view of the beach at Tela, or a terrific view of a coffee plantation, or studies of Mayan monuments. And, again and again, she too is engaged by individuals, by stories of hidden lives lived against the odds.

In the hands of a colourist, the nitty gritty of poverty and deprivation in a warm climate might seem merely exotic. And Cope obviously ran a huge risk of patronising her subjects, of making pretty pictures from personal hardship. That she doesn't is down to her own motivation for being there, to her frankness and honesty, her lack of affectation. She's not a painter-tourist in search of local colour but a witness who wants to find out what it's really like, who is clearly touched by the experience. And all this comes across in the pictures and her accompanying notes.

TWO current exhibitions in Dublin, by Margaret Morrisson at the Rubicon and John Cronin at Green on Red, are ideal candidates for that staple exam question: compare and contrast. Where Cronin is a no-nonsense process painter, Morrisson has progressively invested her work with allusions to plant forms and figuration. Cronin habitually opts for harsh colours, harshly combined - too harshly, on balance - and that still holds true.

He makes very simple, roughly geometric compositions, arranged in panels that overlap or seem to obscure each other, and he drags the paint to mix and layer the colours - hence, presumably, the show's punning title, '(sic): error in quoted matter.' The best pieces in his show are a set of extremely large inkjet prints mounted on Perspex. The process has the effect of de-saturating the colour to some extent, and further flattening the already flat surfaces, both of which work in his favour.

Morrisson's sea-change show happened in 1996. Where previously she made generalised visions of vegetative lushness in hot, intense colours, she became more judicious with her colour and much more sparing with her imagery. In place of crowded hothouse jungles she arranged individual plants and details like botanical samples. She also greatly expanded her range of imagery, incorporating animals, vessels and other antiquities, and quotations from the work of other artists.

Her current show is a continuation of this trend rather than another departure. Plants, and in a wider sense nature, remain her dominant concern. The surfaces of her paintings are complex, layered assemblies of fragments. The paintings look as if they are built up cumulatively, at a considered, meditative pace. While the smaller pieces feature a single, central motif, usually a flower, the larger ones are agreeably miscellaneous and speculative in their arrangements of forms, but there isn't the excitement of discovery that energised her 1996 exhibition.