In Boyle, the undeniable evidence of a wet summer is there in the form of the river lapping at its banks when it should be reduced to a modest seasonal flow. This week, the town's annual Arts Festival is also in full flood. It is now established tradition that the visual arts centrepiece of the festival is a group show of contemporary Irish art at the Convent of Mercy Complex on Carrick Road. This year, it is augmented by a small tribute exhibition of the work of the painter Charles Brady, who died last year.
Artists take part in the group show by invitation, and the curator is Fergus Ahern, by now an old hand. The strength of the selection is its catholicity. There's a certain unpredictability about who's going to turn up each year and, vitally, usually the choice encompasses some surprise younger artists.
This time around, for example, there's Sinead Aldridge, a painter now based in Co Sligo. With several shows to her credit she's not exactly a newcomer, but she is a fresh voice. Her work is abstract, built from broad swathes of muted colour against plain grounds, and it looks particularly good en masse. Blaise Smith is something of a newcomer. His work is not what you'd expect from someone with a background in computers - he has been involved in designing interactive media for the London Underground and the National Gallery of Ireland, among others. But here he's showing extremely accomplished representational paintings of rural Ireland.
Crisply painted in oil on gesso panels, they are not romanticised landscapes but prosaic, factual accounts of the rural world: the haphazard, unfinished look of working farms, the muddy pools in the corner of every other field. American born Alice Lyons is an interesting arrival. She builds her subtle compositions in thin glazes.
There are also examples of fine representational paintings in the formalised landscapes of Cherith McKinstry and the Coldstreamish still lifes and figure studies of John Long. Overall, landscape remains the dominant genre, but it's also a particularly versatile one, encompassing the wild shoreline studies of Mary Lohan, thickly encrusted with paint, and Maighread Tobin's incised slate wall pieces, not to mention Peter Collis's mountain studies, including a dramatic view of Muckish Mountain in Donegal.
There is strong sculptural representation, including good bronzes by Brian King and Cathy Carman, figure groups by John Coen and Remco de Fouw's ominous Pyrogene, with its metal plate bolted into the side of a smooth stone pebble. Carman has moved from her hacked wood figures to bronze and seems thoroughly at home with it. Her figure pieces suggest the influence of Barry Flanagan. Strong printmakers include Elaine Leader, Anthony Lyttle, Marie Louise Martin and the painterly work of Tony O'Malley and Jane O'Malley. Bob Quinn shows two very good photographs.
Boyle makes a virtue of necessity by packing the exhibition into the gymnasium building. There's no point in looking for sophisticated presentation. You just accept the limitations and look at the art. An off-shoot of the festival is the growing civic art collection, some of which is on view in two rooms of King House. Below, in the library, there is a promising collaborative project by two groups, the Moylurg Writers' Group and the Boyle Artists' Group.
The members of these groups have responded to each others' work, writing poems prompted by paintings and making paintings prompted by poems. It could have been an anodyne exercise, and certainly some of the results are predictable, but in several cases something more is achieved and sparks fly. Strong feelings are forcefully and effectively expressed in the work of Jessica Booth and Dolores Sheerin, Edward Bell and Maureen Carty, and Joan Gallagher and Ingrid Wolf.
Over 30 paintings by Charles Brady have been assembled for the exhibition at the offices of Ahern & Co in Greatmeadow. Understated and self-deprecating, Brady's work is as ever engaging and wryly amusing. He focuses on tiny, inconsequential details and objects - envelopes, wallets, apples, a shaving brush - and renders them in muted colour, a master of the art of what to leave out.
Surprisingly, he turned the same technique to landscape, and these always look very good. They're simple pictorially, but extremely atmospheric, as in the remarkable Knockmealdown Landscape, painted in 1970. There's an undoubted poignance to seeing his Sligo Train Lunch Bag, a light, optimistic piece, with the knowledge that it may have been the last painting he made.
Boyle Arts Festival exhibitions continue until Monday, August 3rd
