`Anybody know the word Adeste?" There is much glum shaking of heads. Six children - Sarah and David Larkin (8 and 10), Adeyemi and Adeola Thompson (9 and 8), Anna Conlon (11) and Leo McNamara (7) - have come to test-drive this year's Christmas/millennium exhibition at The Ark in Dublin; nobody expected hard questions. Only Anna, it seems, recognises the word, and even she isn't sure if she knows what it means. Undeterred, The Ark's Bernadette Larkin presses on, working her way with infinite patience through an introductory question-and-answer session on the Christmas story, and artists' representations of it, from the Annunciation to the Nativity, the Shepherds to the Wise Men.
The idea of the Adeste programme is to show children how a story which they know well, and of which they already carry many images in their heads, might be interpreted by living artists - and by the time she gets to The Slaughter of the Innocents, her audience has perked up considerably. "Was it Herod that got all the babies killed?" David suggests. "Herod, yeah," Leo chips in. "He was very mean. He was king of the Romans." Even for kids who have grown up with the electronic evil of Jurassic Park and Star Wars, Herod is a force to be reckoned with. But one word that even the most streetwise kid can't relate to is the word "commission". It just doesn't occur to kids that you might get paid to muck about with paints, and when Bernadette explains that 12 Irish artists were given a lot of money to produce works specially for this exhibition, their eyes widen in disbelief.
"How much?" Leo demands. "A lot," says Bernadette, firmly. When, into the bargain, it is hinted that many of the artists didn't use paint at all, but a variety of materials including beeswax and tar, they don't need to be invited twice to come upstairs to the gallery and take a look. "Wow - what's in there?" Three bodies make a beeline for what could be a window, a wall-mounted wooden packing case or, as Anna points out, "the thing they take the bread out of, in church". When the "shutters" are opened it turns out to be Paki Smith's Bad Weather for the Kings, a highly atmospheric meeting of wax and wood in which the three hapless monarchs, adrift in a storm-tossed sea, contemplate an enormous, chandelier-type structure hanging in the sky above their little boat. There has, says Bernadette, been some disagreement as to whether the latter represents a halo or a spaceship. She invites suggestions for a word to describe the sky. "Dark," pronounces Adeyemi unceremoniously. "But there's a waterfall, look . . ."
He points to a cone-shaped bright patch amid rocky darkness. That's light from the sky, I think, isn't it? Bernadette is tact personified, but Adeyemi won't be swayed. "No, it's definitely a waterfall." As to what the painting might be made of, David reckons it's spray paint. Leo, who has already moved on to the painting next door, bounces back into the centre of the group. "By the look of it, it's like wax," he declares. He's right. The heads peer with undisguised fascination at a glass jar full of bright orange pigment and another of crumbly lumps of wax. "Cheddar cheese," somebody remarks. Sarah closes the painting's panels carefully before moving on. The painting which hangs next to Smith's, Martin Gale's The Flight Into Egypt, is at once more conventional and more of a challenge.
"That's deadly," exclaims David at once, examining the fine detail of the brushwork used to create a line of vividly surreal palm trees and bushes stretching into the desert. "How did he do that? It's so tidy, and you can see every leaf. . ." It is a moment or two before everyone realises there are no human figures in the painting, just a sinister emptiness, with smoke rising lazily from some buildings in the distance. A further moment brings the realisation that in a desert landscape, you don't have chimneys. This smoke is a sign of bad news. The children gaze at the eerie canvas, enraptured. "The people rushed away," says Adeole in her quiet voice, picking out a sandal lying disconsolately in the stone-strewn sand. "Maybe the fire was burning them." And where are all the people now, do you think? "Down there." Sarah's finger points unhesitatingly to the end of the artist's cleverly-created line of perspective. So much for composition; kid's stuff, if it's done properly.
Anna is anxious to know how long it took the artists to produce the pictures, and is gratified by the answer; more than eight months from the time when they were commissioned last April until the exhibition was hung in mid-November. David loves the Gale picture, but is gradually being drawn to the next wall, and Patrick Pye's And God Pitched His Tent Among Men. "Why is there a dead guy on the top there? There's blood coming out of him, look . . ." According to Bernadette this particular guy is God. He has no face, she adds, because religious painters never paint God's face. There is a stunned silence. Why not? Sara wants to know. Because nobody knows what it looks like, I suppose, says Bernadette. Sarah digests this for a moment, then counters with: "So how do they know what Jesus looks like?"
Everyone loves this painting, with its glorious rich colours and mad geometric composition. "Beautiful. It's beautiful." Adeola nods her approval. David has found that if you look at it from a certain angle, you can see shiny gold streaks here and there on the surface, and when it's explained that this is because the whole thing is painted on a base of copper, there are gasps of delight. Copper! Gold, frankincense and myrrh are, suddenly, peanuts in comparison. The muddy browns of Rita Duffy's Refugee, an unpromising dark rectangle with three tiny, bright squares containing a house, a baby and a pair of hands behind bars, provide another startling visual contrast.
Bernadette asks if anyone knows what a refugee is. "There's refugees in Kosovo," begins Leo, but David has a better idea. "I saw this film called Atomic Train and everyone had to get out of Denver, where they lived, coz there was a bomb." He indicates the painting's muddy brown background; seen from close up, it isn't a background at all, but a series of vehicles, cars, buses, aeroplanes. "So is this about panic? In Atomic Train they were all driving around trying to get out, and shouting at each other . . ." Bernadette points out a tractor, and jokes about its unsuitability for a fast getaway. "I'd try and get away on anything, if it was me," is the stoutly sensible reply.
Another vivid contrast: but Chris Banahan's glowing turquoise-and-gold Adeste, colours guaranteed to appeal to children, you would think, gets an initial thumbs-down. "I don't like that one." "Looks like loads of pieces are missing." "But - oh, there's Mary and Jesus and all . . ." They relent a little when they find out that the artist made his preliminary sketches in Bewley's - on bits of Bewley's serviettes, which Bernadette promptly produces, along with pieces of the wood used in the piece. She explains that Banahan wanted to create the impression of something very, very old which had been broken up and partly put back together again, and points to various scufflings and scratchings on the panel which represents part of the door of the stable in Bethlehem. "You know the way, when places are very holy, very special, people want to leave their name to show they've been there?" David nods sagely. "Like Justin Haley left his name on his desk." Leo seizes an L-shaped piece of turquoise and gold wood from the artist's background box, levels it at David, and shoots. "Hasta la vista, babies . . ."
Tom Molloy's I am Bart Therefore I am, a brightly-coloured painting of a set of shelves, with contemporary images on the top shelf and increasingly older ones as the eye moves lower and lower, attracts a stern "there's nothing religious about this" from Sarah, but when attention is drawn to various details, including a globe and a picture of the earth from space, David holds forth with some authority on the flat-earth theory, and performs a graphic reconstruction of a medieval person falling off the edge of the known world.
"Aaargh . . ." Bernadette points to Bart Simpson's head, and the body on the shelf beneath. "You all know whose head that is, don't you? But is that his body?" "Eat my shorts," retorts the irrepressible Leo. "It's Mickey Mouse, of course."
The last painting which we examine in detail is Sharon Kelly's Release, a charcoal drawing of three hands, two unmistakably adult, one of a chubby baby. There is, of course, charcoal to try out and Adeola is clearly smitten by it, smudging and shading deftly on a piece of white card, unconcerned about the potentially disastrous effect on both fingertips and an immaculate grey school-uniform.
A straw poll on the subject of whether the adult hands are those of a man or a woman votes overwhelmingly for the male option. Only Sarah demurs. "That's Mary holding the baby Jesus," she declares, and, when she's quizzed as to why she's so certain the hands are those of a woman, her casual shrug is more eloquent than a thousand words. Of course it's Mary - she's always the one holding the baby, isn't she?
Adeste at The Ark, comprising 10 paintings and a magical large-scale crib by Jon Kelly and Genevieve Murphy - which we haven't written about because we don't want to give the game away - opens to the public on December 11th, and will be open from 10.30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on various dates (including Sundays) until January 30th. No booking is required for family visits, but children aged five to nine years must be accompanied by an adult. There is also a schools programme which runs until December 22nd, admission by advance booking only. For further information phone 01-6707788
