PHILIP FLANAGAN, a Belfast-born artist in his mid-thirties, has established a reputation over the past decade - mainly in the North - as a portrait sculptor, working in bronze. The 22 heads included in this exhibition represent virtually a gallery (no pun intended) of celebrities in Northern Ireland, in politics, the arts and social life. They include Seamus Heaney, Cardinal Daly, Mary O'Malley, Ian Paisley and Joan Trimble, as well as Southerners such as Charles Haughey, Gordon Lambert, Michael D. Riggins and Myrtle Allen.
Flanagan's style is direct and traditional; he models in heavy, impacted surfaces and while he obviously aims at good likeness, in the usual sense, he is generalised rather than detailed in his treatment (he does add a pair of earrings to the head of one female sitter, but they seem necessary to the whole effect rather than a mere embellishment). In most cases he stops at the neck, but in a few cases he has added busts - including those of the two clergymen, Cardinal Daly and the Rev Ian Paisley.
I thought the head of the senior painter Tom Carr one of the best, both as a sculpture and as a likeness - Flanagan has a real feeling for innate character. That of Seamus Heaney is one of the weaker efforts, while those of Mary O'Malley and Joan Trimble suggest that Flanagan responds well to women sitters. In general, too, he seems more at ease with private individuals than with public ones (perhaps a young artist, such as he still is, can be inhibited by Elder Statesmen).
What is rather lacking is any very strong personal style; the idiom is a fairly stock RA or RHA one, though without old-style academic rigor mortis. That extra quality of sensitivity which the late F.E. McWilliam could infuse into his portrait heads, and which Carolyn Mulholland, among living artists, can command too, is somehow absent. We are dealing with decent, serviceable prose rather than visual poetry.
