VISUAL ARTS: Doagh Isle is a peninsula on the much larger peninsula of Inishowen, in Co Donegal. Dominated by the vast expanse of the Atlantic to the west and north, and fringed by hills and mountains, it provides the stunning setting and inspiration for Melita Denaro's exhibition New Paintings From The Isle Of Doagh, at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin.

She doesn't so much paint the landscape as paint its weather or, as she puts it, its air. The weather coming in from the ocean perpetually remakes the visible world on Doagh, and Denaro sets out to paint this endless process of change and reinvention.

Of Maltese and Irish parentage, she was born and grew up in Burt, at the base of Inishowen, close to Derry. She was sent to school in England for several years but never lost her fierce attachment to Co Donegal. Following her father's death, however, when she was 17, the family had to leave Ireland. Although she wanted to be a painter, she was out of sympathy with the abstraction that dominated in the early 1970s, and she went to study ceramics at the Central School of Art - now Central St Martins College of Art and Design - in London.

She went on to work as a ceramicist, and it was only when she inherited enough money to allow her to take a year off that she took the chance to pursue painting, studying part-time for several years with Oliver Bevan, whom she credits as an important influence whose advice and teaching had a decisive effect on her.

Eventually she argued her way onto the three-year master's course in painting at the Royal Academy Schools in London. She had to argue because, as she says, she had come late to painting and was by then above the nominal age limit of 35. Once there she immersed herself in the life room for the first two years, wanting to develop a solid basis of draughtsmanship for painting.

A turning point came in 1990, when she saw the Monet In The '90s, a Royal Academy exhibition of the painter's celebrated series of paintings of identical subjects - Rouen Cathedral, haystacks, poplars - through a succession of lighting and atmospheric conditions.

It occurred to her that here was the key to an approach to landscape. She decided to return again and again to precise locations. "I basically paint the same two fields on Doagh," she says.

Throughout her time in London she never lost sight of Donegal. Eventually they "got together enough money to buy a tiny house on Doagh". Now, although she divides her time between Doagh and London, she instinctively speaks of Doagh as home. As she outlines it, she follows an exceptional routine, spending about 10 days of every month on Doagh and the remainder in London. She drives and catches a ferry in Liverpool, because bringing paintings back and forth would be impractical by air.

At Doagh she works out in the landscape, on small plywood panels. Then she brings them back to her studio in London, where they feed into larger paintings. She has been careful about tackling larger-scale pieces, and you understand why when you see her work. Although she follows a gruelling schedule between her two working spaces, it is the energy and vitality of life in Doagh that drive her work. There is an urgency to every mark she makes.

She paints with a tremendous quality of attack. The evidence is not only the brusque, gestural strokes with which she applies pigment but also the way she often scrapes and gouges the surfaces. It is as if she works in concentrated, all-or-nothing bursts, making distinct passes over a painting and getting it either right or wrong. Right and she preserves the captured immediacy of the scene, wrong and she must try again and again.

She cites Turner, Camille Corot and Aelbert Cuyp as significant influences. And, she says, she is more and more drawn to Monet "because of the way he paints the air in his landscapes". She doesn't mention Constable's small oil sketches, but her work is very much in sympathy with their vibrant immediacy. There is a strong feeling in the larger works of opening out or making a space, whereas the smaller pieces are more purely descriptive. But the larger paintings also feel atmospherically true.

The long, anecdotal titles she gives her paintings indicate how intimately they reflect the reality of her daily experience on Doagh. In his introduction to the catalogue, Liam Campbell emphasises how closely her painting is woven into and from the fabric of communal life there. "That painted cow belongs to somebody, was brought into the world by someone and is lovingly cared for by someone."

Equally she is true to the atmospheric precision of the moment, and that is where her strategy of painting a single location is relevant. The place is the same, but it's different every time.

New Paintings From The Isle Of Doagh by Melita Denaro is at the Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until July 12th