Reviewed:

Seβn McSweeney & Friends, Boyle Arts Festival (Convent of Mercy Complex), Co Roscommon, until Saturday (079-63085)

With the wisdom of hindsight, it's easy to see that at some point, perhaps even way back in the 1960s, it should have become clear that Seβn McSweeney was in it for the long haul.

There was a tendency to see his interest in Irish landscape painting - that old chestnut - as a footnote to the work of Jack B. Yeats. Or - another critical response - that he would drift in time into academicism.

But there was nothing modish or fickle about his interest in painting landscape. And he never drifted. In fact, over the years he has applied himself to a well-defined area of exploration with an almost relentless fixity and concentration, and a continual renewal of purpose and ideas.

This has resulted in an exceptionally rich body of work, and his sheer stubbornness and integrity must number among the reasons why he is so highly regarded by his peers.

He's also sociable, generous and modest. All of which made him a terrific choice to put together this year's Boyle Arts Festival show. The title - Seβn McSweeney & Friends - is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, because if he had to cram in work by all his artist friends, a rather larger venue would have been called for, but what we have, all the same, is a fine exhibition, intriguing for the insights it might offer into McSweeney's artistic tastes.

Often, artists whose work seems closely related are distinctly wary of each other. The more similar the work, in fact, the more wary and critical they are likely to be. So a generosity of spirit is evident in McSweeney's inclusion of a number of estimable landscape painters - or, more accurately perhaps, estimable artists whose work comes in some way under the heading of landscape.

Close to home - his home in Ballyconnell, Co Sligo, that is - are Nick Miller's remarkably expansive accounts of the rolling, watery terrain, as vibrant and densely textured as Bruegel's, with that feeling of being packed with life and incident, only without the bucolic peasants.

The schematic compositions of Anita Shelbourne's mountainous scenes recall aspects of McSweeney's own approach, though their muted, misty tonality does not. The same strong sense of abstract design is characteristic of the paintings of Tony O'Malley and, for that matter, of John Shinnors, whose four-part Estuary is like a plan or series of aerial photographs. Barrie Cooke's rock and water paintings, plus his study of an algae-clogged shore of Lough Arrow, find him in fairly schematic form, as well, though gestural fluidity wins out in the end.

While Martin Gale's hard realist approach is almost the opposite of McSweeney's gestural method, they both embody an extraordinary fidelity to the way things are. Mary Lohan's pared-down shoreline studies have a stark, elemental presence but also a luxuriance in their feeling for paint. Gwen O'Dowd's works on paper are tactile and sensitive. Elizabeth Caffrey's beautiful ceramic sculptures, their concentric patterns suggestive of geological layering and patterns, are imbued with a sense of the earth.

Veronica Bolay's pictures see in the magical, shifting atmospherics of precipitation an analogue for moments of insight and wonder. They are landscapes, but charged with a sense of epiphany.

The Boyle Civic Collection cannily snapped up a landscape by Colin Harrison, for although landscape often features in his beautifully made paintings, such an exclusive approach is rare. It was canny, as well, of McSweeney to tag Harrison, a generally underappreciated painter, for inclusion.

Barbara Warren's work always has the air of being meticulously constructed, with a sense of clarity and design about it, and she shows three very good pictures. David Crone is an exceptional painter - he has, coincidentally, a solo show running at the Sligo Art Gallery - and the distinctively slow, clotted surfaces of his paintings, with an offbeat palette and overlapping patterns of planes, confirm him as a master of pictorial arrangement.

So far, you might think, the show could be subtitled "approaches to landscape", but there is a great deal more to it.

Cecily Brennan once made a series of paintings based on Ben Bulben, but her work here treats emotional life in terms of the fragility and resilience of the body, with tough, dark humour.

Pat Harris's pumpkins have a Rothko-like, luminous glow. The portrait studies of two boys by Cherith McKinstry, who has long been highly regarded by McSweeney, are gems.

McSweeney is clearly not averse to abstraction, though it is a term that can be broadly applied. Taffina Flood's three textural abstracts look so good together that they could be a triptych. There are fine works by SinΘad Aldridge and Fiona Joyce, abstract but with their roots firmly in the world of facts. James O'Connor has refined his method into a dance of motifs against ground of flat colour that could be read as abstract, while James O'Nolan's rigorously argued wood black prints are process-based.

An allegorical vein runs through some of the sculpture, from Patrick O'Reilly's satirical bronzes - his fibreglass penguins are the show's engaging mascots - to John Coen's symbolic dramas. Janet Mullarney's animal spirits inhabit our domestic world, while Conor Fallon's animals are themselves but enshrine human ideals and qualities. Cathy Carman also uses animal imagery - fish - in a striking, ambiguous visualisation of the state of bondage in which we live. Bill Freedland's constructions explore a complex engagement with the landscape.

There are some extremely subtle choices, as well, including the Northern painter Padraig McCann, whose work is not that well known south of the Border but is a consistently interesting artist. Melanie le Brocquy's fine Head Inclined is surely unusual for her. All of which, it has to be said, doesn't by any means exhaust the goodies to be found in McSweeney's capacious rattle bag.