The online painters of Sherkin

The exhibition at the community hall on Sherkin Island, off the coast of west Cork, is not your average summer show. Art On The Island is a commercial venture, put together by Jim Donovan of the Private Collector Gallery in Innishannon, Co Cork, with works by Louis le Brocquy, Tony O'Malley, George Campbell and Graham Knuttel hanging alongside works by younger artists such as Martin Finnin and Majella O'Neill Collins.

But art on the island has another meaning. Off season, the community hall is the base for a unique distance-learning programme, a joint venture between the school of art, design and printing at Dublin Institute of Technology and Sherkin Island Development Society. The aim is to let residents of Sherkin, of the six other inhabited islands off west Cork and of the west Cork mainland study part-time for a degree in art without having to move to a city.

Students spend 30 days on Sherkin between October and April, studying painting and drawing skills in four-day workshops. Sitting in the hall as a class, the students can see and hear the lecturer in Dublin on a video-conferencing link, ask questions and receive answers. Essays are sent back and forth by e-mail. While distance learning has traditionally worked well with academic subjects, this is the first time it has been used in an area where manual skills are an integral part of the community.

The first intake of students has completed the first stage of the pilot module. A second intake, of 15 students, will begin its studies in September, while the first group continues with the second stage of the pilot module. Dublin Institute of Technology may validate the pilot programme this year, so that it will earn its participants credits towards a degree.

The link between the exhibition and the distance-learning programme is O'Neill Collins, who lives on Sherkin. She is represented by the Private Collector Gallery and in the past year has mounted sell-out shows of her striking seascapes in New York, Chicago and Sydney. At the same time, she was working as facilitator on the distance-learning course.

O'Neill Collins has a degree in fine art from Limerick College of Art and Design. Her grandfather was from Sherkin, but she grew up on the mainland and married into the island, as they say, when she met her husband, a salmon fisherman. She discovered there were several people interested in life drawing, and started a regular Friday-evening class on the island. Another artist, Bernadette Burns, who lectures in painting at DIT, also has a home and studio on the island. She noticed that O'Neill Collins's life classes had created an appetite for more formal art education, and mentioned this to John O'Connor, the head of the school of art, design and printing.

O'Connor has a special interest in islanders, having spent the past 15 summers on Great Blasket, and his interest as an academic is making education relevant to the community. The demand for a degree course in art on Sherkin was a project tailor-made for him, while Burns was ideal as a lecturer. In February 1998, the staff of DIT and Sherkin Island Development Society held the first of several meetings. "It is very important for us that this venture is a genuine partnership between an academic institution and a community organisation," says O'Connor.

"This is the aspect that has attracted international interest. It is the democratisation of education. We are not simply going in there in a paternalistic way, telling them what they need. DIT is also learning from the islanders, and designing a programme that is relevant to their needs."

Liam Chambers, the island's development officer, stresses the importance of art to an island community. "Living on an island is not a disadvantage to an artist, as it is in the case of fishing, farming or manufacturing. Sherkin has an unusually high proportion of artists per head of population, with eight out of 98 adults selling and exhibiting full time, and another seven or so painting occasionally."

Another reason Sherkin was suitable for a distance-learning project was the existence, thanks to the development society, of a computer-literate population, and the availability of computers, e-mail, an ISDN connection and a video-conferencing link in the community hall.

Among those who completed the pilot module is Geoffrey Stephens, the foreman stonemason for D·chas, based at Sherkin Abbey. At 61, he is the oldest participant. "I studied at Cardiff College of Art, but never qualified; then I worked in London as a designer, so I'm certainly not new to the art game. I went to Majella's life-drawing classes, and to others on the mainland.

"When the chance to study formally right on my own doorstep came up, I thought I'd give it a try. I would never have gone to Dublin to do it. It was very exciting. We are all mature students, with jobs and families to contend with. We all passed, with only two of the 15 dropping out, due to ill health, and I think everyone found a great increase in confidence."

Stephens will be continuing this year, but Neisha Azzopardi, a young mother of three, will not. "I'll go on painting, because I've always enjoyed it, but at this point it is becoming a career rather than art for art's sake. The course has helped me to develop organisational skills, but now I'd like to progress with my painting skills on my own. With the amount of effort I have put into painting, I am starting to think that it's time I got something back economically."

Not all artists on Sherkin feel the need for formal study, including Seβn O'Neill. A carpenter, and a native of Sherkin who has travelled the world, he admires the work of Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Turner. He began painting again recently, after a long break. His landscapes show the shapes and colours of the land and sea, simplified until they are almost abstract.

Kordula Packard, a choreographer from Germany, married into the island when she met George Packard, an American writer. She discovered her painting skills at O'Neill Collins's class and painted intensively for three years, by which time she had accumulated so much work that she had to sell some. Thus the Packard Gallery, located in their tiny cottage at the far end of the island, came into being. She keeps in touch with potential clients via e-mail, sending out scans of her work.

Two years ago, Sherkin acquired a new, £800,000 pier, which can accommodate a roll-on roll-off ferry; the island also has a new marina. The Leader programme - a rural-development scheme that draws on EU Structural Funds - has helped to set up several other tourism ventures, most recently a 21-bedroom hotel. An e-commerce portal, at www.emara.com, is promoting sales of art and craft, among other things. A population explosion, relatively speaking, has seen the number of people living on Sherkin increase from 83 in 1997 to 135 in 2001, while school enrolment has risen from three to 18. And the development society has plans for a £1 million art and cultural centre for the island.

But not everyone is happy. "Inevitably, development gives rise to tensions, but we call them healthy tensions," says Chambers. "Resistance to change is not coming from the older islanders, but from people who moved to Sherkin in the past 25 years or so. There is a feeling in some quarters that Sherkin is becoming a bit too hectic."

Art On The Island is open daily, noon-6 p.m., until August 31st. Work by Majella O'Neill Collins is on show at the Mews restaurant in Baltimore, Co Cork. Bernadette Burns is exhibiting at the Art Cafe, Baltimore. Work by Neisha Azzopardi, Clare O'Connor and Seβn O'Neill can be seen at the Islander's Rest Hotel, Sherkin