If you wander into the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre in Foster Place, you'll find the room aglow with the passionate, brilliantly colourful work of Stephen Walsh. Walsh lives and works in Dublin, and has been painting since about 1990.
In the late 1980s he was one of a group of people consulted by the actor Daniel Day Lewis, who was preparing for his role as Christy Brown in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot. Shortly afterwards he came into contact with painter Brian Maguire. As he puts it: "Brian Maguire showed me how to scream. He put the brush in my hand. When I'd screamed and roared enough, I painted what I saw." He began to exhibit his work, showing at the Point Depot, the Guinness Hop Store, the Edinburgh Festival and with the group touring exhibition Celebrating Difference. He showed in Temple Bar during a residency in the Studios a few years ago.
He also made an extraordinary imaginative leap. Ideas encapsulated in the music and writing of Jamaican Bob Marley became woven seamlessly into his pictorial language. As the title of his current show, Jah's Seed, makes clear, his work is laced with references to Rastafarian ideas. In fact it follows on from a visit to Jamaica. "I never felt more alive than I did in Jamaica. It's my home."
During his relatively short life, Bob Marley transformed the status of reggae. He took this minor form of West Indian popular music, with its distinctive, leisurely rhythm, and made it into a worldwide phenomenon - and a vehicle for his Rastafarian ideas. At the core of Rastafarianism is a transposition of the story of the Jews exiled to Babylon. That is how, for Rastafarians, Babylon is a blanket term for degenerate white culture. Their Chosen People are the exiled Africans who will be repatriated by Ras Tafari, the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.
Wrapped up in these ideas is a powerful message for the victims of slavery and colonialism. Walsh identifies strongly with the words and spirit of Marley. Just as Marley's lyrics cut to the core of political reality at the heart of Rastafarian spirituality, so Walsh instinctively identifies the personal relevance of the political message.
"I'm Stephen Walsh, black Irishman. I've found the African in me. Maybe now I can invert the image and find the Irish." When he speaks of "buying off the cripples with electric wheelchairs. Just like we buy off the poor with videos", he is casting Marley's baleful Rastafarian eye on the shortcomings of Babylon, the vested interests that "keep them crippled and poor".
His painting Babylon Burnin' puts the torch to the institutions that maintain the rotten status quo. In Dinner For One in Babylon he depicts his own exile, metaphoric and perhaps actual. Yet his work is also full of the celebratory quality of reggae. I am a Lucky Bastard, as one title has it.
Time and again he relishes the ordinary things of life with real passion, from the trees in College Green to the Ha-penny Bridge By Night. There is also a tremendous longing in these pictures, a longing for a world beyond Babylon, visualised in the almost utopian serenity of Glorious Day and A Seed of Jah. It is clear that, for Walsh, something of this world is to be found in Jamaica. He hopes to return there early next year.
Jah's Seed by Stephen Walsh continues at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Foster Place until Wednesday, December 23rd, Tues-Fri 10 a.m.-4 p.m."