TOM Carr, now in his 87th year, is for generations of Ulster people, their favourite artist. In his gentle, apparently natural style, he reflects his own world of middle class family outings to Newcastle's beach, white washed corrugated iron roofed farmhouses observed in the cleft of drumlin valleys.
Also, unlike many of the North's landscape painters, he found no need for Co Donegal, Co Down being inspiration - enough. In works such as Legge's Hill Fox, where a fox confronts a snow bound robin amongst the brambles a cloying Christmas cardy whimsy acts as a deterrent, deflecting appreciation of consumate craftsmanship acquired at the Slade.
Indeed, the more somber tones of Ormonde Quay and Dover, painted in the late 1930s, and the excellent Making Coloured Parachutes, dating from his time as an official war artist (in Northern Ireland), reveal him as a member of the Euston Road School dealing with social observation in an austere observational manner.
It is a long way from this to the soft focus sentimentally post impressionist tones of Leaving - a rare narrative study of rural depopulation and the well painted but gently patronising landscape with double goat portrait William and Mary.
Essentially, Carr is a watercolourist who disciplines oils to a similar score though the haunting Edenderry House, the bare house a bleak threnody against its dark, Lagan side coppice, suggests that once he could have merited a reputation as a serious painter.
As for the show's title, well there is a focusing spot of red - seaside bonnet, tractor cab, robin's breast, rusty roof - in the majority of the lighter paintings.