A visit to Co Mayo in 1994 proved a turning point in the life of artist Nancy Wynne-Jones, writes Aidan Dunne. Today, at the age of 80, the Welsh artist is producing her strongest work todate

Nancy Wynne-Jones at Eighty is a celebration of the life and work of the Welsh-born artist who has been based in Ireland since 1972. Even prior to that, she had established herself as a presence on the Irish art scene, showing in the Project Arts Centre in 1970. The hallmarks of her painterly style were then, and remain, a gestural boldness of design, an audacious colour sense and an uncompromising approach to pictorial problems - that is to say, she never opts for pat, ingratiating solutions and there is always an underlying aesthetic toughness and rigour to her work.

There is also her enduring commitment to the representational motif. For despite the fact that many people would describe a great deal of her painting as being, to a greater or lesser degree, abstract, it is very strongly rooted in a sense of place. In fact, as this beautifully illustrated volume demonstrates, specific places tend to draw distinctive, impassioned pictorial responses from her. As recently as 1994, for example, she discovered a whole new inspirational terrain when she visited north Mayo at the behest of the Ballinglen Foundation.

"Going to Mayo," she wrote last year, "was a turning point in my life and work." The huge open spaces of a landscape unlike any she'd known before posed new challenges for her. In response she devised a pictorial method combining "traditional perspective with on-the-surface forms", an approach she has refined considerably since. The net effect could be described as a marriage of close, tangible detail and sweeping, epic scale, but what comes across most vividly in the Mayo paintings is her enraptured absorption in the process of finding a pictorial equivalent for her own experience of the spirit of place.

Nancy Wynne-Jones was born in Dolgellau, in North Wales. Her mother was English and her father was of an old Welsh family. The year was split between homes in Wales and Dorset.

Because Nancy was considered a "rather delicate" child, she was educated at home by a governess. She drew and painted from early on, and received lessons from illustrator Ruth Gervis, who taught her the importance of close observation, of "truth to nature" - something that certainly stayed with her.

She was 16 at the outbreak of the second World War, during which, tragically, both her brothers were killed. She herself did war work for the Ordnance Survey. In the meantime, she had decided to make music her career and studied the violin and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In music, as in visual art, she was interested in and responsive to new ideas, and her musical compositions reflect this openness. But in time - having run a bookshop in Fulham for several years - she gravitated back towards painting, attending the Chelsea School of Art. Derek Middleton, a painter with whom she had a two-year relationship (which ended rather spectacularly, as she describes it, with some understatement, in the book), suggested that she might be interested in going to study with the painter Peter Lanyon in Cornwall.

It was a crucial turning point for her. The charismatic Lanyon, Cornwall itself and the remarkable artistic community there became central to her life and work. Her extended interview with Brian Fallon, her brother-in-law,which makes up the bulk of the text in the book, provides a wealth of illuminating detail about this and indeed other phases of her life, with intriguing accounts of Lanyon, the potter Bernard Leach and many of the other major artistic personalities in Cornwall.

Incidentally, something that may not quite come across here is that Nancy was, by all accounts, an extremely and significantly supportive figure within the St Ives artistic community.

Lanyon's death following a gliding accident in 1964 was a tragic loss and also marked something of a turning point in the history of St Ives as an artistic centre. As it happened, at the time of Lanyon's death, the sculptor Conor Fallon was visiting Tony O'Malley in St Ives when he and Nancy met. They married two years later. Eventually, with changing circumstances in Cornwall, they decided to move to Ireland, settling initially in Kinsale and then in Co Wicklow.

On the whole, Ireland has been extremely good for her, providing the material for much of her finest work. It seems fair to say that Wicklow, including both the immediate environment of the garden with its pond - painted recurrently through the hours and the seasons - and the further landscape, has been an extremely fruitful source of inspiration as has, latterly, Mayo.

There is a breadth and openness to her approach that prevents her being slotted too easily into any local school or style. Her adventurous way with colour and gesture imbues even the most familiar subject matter with great verve and freshness. Such is her lack of sentimentality that occasional paintings featuring bursts of unrestrained lyricism, that might seem excessive in other hands, have the same quiet authority that distinguishes her more chromatically muted paintings. Her most recent exhibition provided ample evidence that she is, at 80, making some of her strongest paintings to date.