Artist confrontations at the rim of the world

COMMON LIFE: There's a painting I like by Tom Hammick, an Englishman who spends three months of each year in what he calls "…

COMMON LIFE: There's a painting I like by Tom Hammick, an Englishman who spends three months of each year in what he calls "remote parts of the world". Three-quarters of the picture is sky: enormous slatey-blue cloud darkening to a gleam at the horizon, itself a distant ridge of bog above a reach of brooding, peaty fields. I don't need the title to tell where this is: the two richly-worked tones of light and dark, the gleam between, seem to belong uniquely to Céide Fields.

What keeps the coast of north Co Mayo a remote part of the world is more than distance from cities or that corrupting convenience known as infrastructure. The remoteness is one of experience, of unfamiliar kinds of space and light, of a sweeping, windy landscape that merely tolerates people and cares little for their comfort. "Bring Wellingtons," the Ballinglen Arts Foundation warns its painters. "Our advice is always: layers."

This summer saw completion of the foundation's 10th year and the arrival of its 133rd artist, in a venture for which quixotic is altogether too trivial a word. There is something of the best American in the efficiency of its idealism, its warm achievement of excellence, but the mood is also easy and Irish.

Serious professional artists from anywhere at all can apply for a fellowship to stay in Ballycastle for up to several months, living in rent-free cottages and working in purpose-built studios bathed with natural light. These have been built within the facade of Ballycastle's wide main street, along with the Foundation Centre and its 2,000-volume art library.

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Next door is the renovated gallery that every two months becomes the official District Courthouse, its proceedings cheered up no end by the assorted images glowing from its walls.

One in 10 of the foundation applicants gets lucky. Selection by directors Margo Dolan and her husband, Peter Maxwell, both from Philadelphia, depends not only on colour slides and reputation, but on the promise of both hard work and agreeably sociable instincts: they must seem likely to "fit in" . Just as the foundation's physical presence is at the heart of the town, a good half of its purpose is to help the community, an objective that has secured substantial funding (€65,000 annually from the Arts Council, for example). Mayo County Council has also helped, but no money has ever been asked directly of the people of north Co Mayo. The dreams of expansion and a search for funding are never-ending.

Between the fellows of Ballinglen, their families and many visitors, the foundation has generated 19,556 bed-nights in Ballycastle, most of them out of season and often in the harshest winter months. The shops and pubs are part of the artists' everyday lives, together, very often, with a role in educational programmes: across the road from the studios, two fine arts printing presses (paid for by the Arts Council) are helping to develop and focus some promising local student talent.

The foundation gallery, open seven days a week from noon to 6 p.m., picks its works from the 230 presented by the artists to the Ballinglen Archive. There are paintings and prints of a quality to grace any metropolitan gallery.

I mentioned here recently the work of Stuart Shils of Philadelphia - small pastel paintings that catch the experience of north Co Mayo's shifting weather and light with a striking immediacy and depth. Completed in successive and furiously productive visits to Ballycastle, they have helped lift him from impecunious beginnings, painting houses for a living, to selling in New York and San Francisco galleries at several thousand dollars a painting.

Margo Dolan and Peter Maxwell have been fascinated to watch their artists responding to landscape and weather that seemed to confront them personally and sensually, drawing them out from the studio into wind and rain, painting sometimes with a hood up, their brush flowing literally "wet into wet". The need to work small and fast on the spot, or be brave with a palette knife, can be positively character-building.

Precisely the things that put a lot of tourists off - the bleakness and barrenness of moors and cliffs, the wildly unreliable skies - stir deep creative wellsprings: "I feel as though I have been to the rim of the world," one artist wrote. Even to stand at the tip of Downpatrick Head, a few minutes from one's car, and contemplate the surge of ocean around the sea-stack, is to tremble to vibrations from infinity.

Some of the Ballinglen artists find themselves intimidated by such landscape and turn to the more intimate contours of human habitation, or to colour and texture in close and revelatory detail: gnarled hedges, lichens, fossils, the weave of driftwood or rock. The range of images is dazzling, but, despite its cosmopolitanism, seems immune from fashion or codology.

BALLYCASTLE got used to being passed by, even by the tour buses heading west to Céide, a few kilometres along the cliffs. This month, about 30 people in the town are directly involved with the Ballinglen Centre, among them Irish, American and English artists and their families, and local students staffing the gallery.

Summer and winter, there's a buzz in a town where very little stirred before, and money in circulation that does not depend on tourism or sunny weather.

As it happens, Ballycastle is not alone in north Co Mayo in discovering the value of local natural resources that never get used up. On the other side of Céide Fields, in the coastal village of Belderg, a purpose-built research and community centre pioneered by Seamus Caulfield brings year-round fieldwork visits by archaeologists, geologists and other earth scientists.

Like artists, they come to work in the local landscape, using B&Bs, shops and pubs; like artists, they surprise by being down-to-earth, positive and cheerful - human resources indeed, in the long months from one summer to the next.

We have some remarkable landscapes, with fabulous natural and human histories. Ballycastle and Belderg are twin inspirations for ways to use them that enrich science and art, the local communities and even the rest of the world.