Hands up all those who'd rather walk barefoot on hot coals than listen to a tune on a set of uileann pipes? Straight to the front of the class anyone whose idea of a close encounter with a painting is to glance at the art review section of your weekend colour supplement. How many of us have mutated from Generation X'ers to Generation V'ers - vicarious souls, people for whom the review suffices?
J.B. Vallely (known as Brian) is a man unencumbered by such shortcuts, although he wears both his musical and visual artistry lightly. A number of things are striking when you encounter Vallely for the first time. Evidently he saves his bravura for his paintings, since his demeanour is filled with the reticence of a man not altogether comfortable with the notion of self-promotion. Then there's his unrestrained passion for traditional music in general, and piping in particular. This is no artist-cum-piper. Vallely cuts his cloth closer to the measure of a man whose breaths draw on music and art in turn to fuel his very existence.
Vallely has just had a massive 40-year retrospective (1960 2000) exhibition of his work in The Marketplace, Armagh city's magnificent new Arts Centre; and his book, A Work Of Art (with accompanying text by his cousin, musicologist Fintan Vallely) has been published as a celebration of his artistic portfolio. It's a spectacular assault on the senses: fiddlers and box players colliding with careening cyclists and shrewd "bullet throwers" (as boules players in Armagh are known) amid a riot of colour. Not for the faint-hearted, A Work Of Art is in essence a spirited review of the breadth and depth of Vallely's art work. And amid all the excitement of exhibitions and book launches, he still manages to find time to nurture the Armagh Pipers' Club (which he founded in 1966) to its current thriving state with over 160 members.
Vallely is studiously nonchalant about the directions he has taken over the first six decades of his life. Curiously, music and art coalesced at a very early age, their boundaries melding as the young artist cast around for new forms of expression, new ways of seeing.
"It was in Art College in Edinburgh that I started playing (the pipes)," he says. Then, as now, he was moved by the sheer passion of the music he heard at fleadhanna and sessions. "The anarchy of the music that I heard at my first fleadh ceoil, the uninhibited playing, was just incredible, and it made a big impact on me, coming from an urban background.
Vallely finds it difficult to explain his penchant for mixing art and music. To him, it's simply the most natural thing to do.
"It's difficult to say where one ends and the other begins," he says. "Logically and rationally, the most important thing in my life is painting. For one thing, it's the only profitable part of my life. I mightn't be able to indulge in the other things, if I hadn't a proper job, as it were." Irish art hasn't been inundated with artists depicting traditional musicians at play. Vallely believes that this absence reflects a cultural hauteur that ill-served the music, never mind its expression in art.
"Particularly after Partition, and after the Free State Government was set up, traditional music did take a major nosedive in terms of the respect it got. Traditional musicians would have been seen but not heard. There would have been a lot more thought of somebody who could sing a piece of light opera badly than somebody who could play fantastic music on the flute, for example. "I didn't start painting musicians in order to bestow any halos on them, but I was conscious that by painting them, it was an extension of playing and promoting the music. And that has worked, in that I know there are people who are now listening to traditional music, whose first contact with it was through my paintings."
Vallely has had his share of critical opprobrium, with particular criticism levelled at the volume of his work (some 60 per cent) devoted to traditional music and musicians.
Vallely's homeplace of Armagh has had minimal impact on his art. Is he deliberately apolitical in his painting?
"I did a couple of overtly political paintings when I was in art college," he recalls, "because I was very interested at that time in Diego Rivera and many of the Mexican mural painters. I did have some grandiose notions about painting Irish history through a harsh lens - but I never actually got around to that. Even though I was very actively involved in politics for a number of years, I never felt compelled to portray that in my paintings. But neither have I felt in any way drawn to any of the political parties."
Vallely is quick to dispel any hint of disillusionment in his aversion to party politics. "I don't think that politics expresses what people really need in life. There's nothing idealistic about politics. It's really the art of manoeuvre and opportunism and opportunity. By and large, it's the lowest common denominator that counts."
Vallely is firm in his belief that music and the portrayal of music has the potential to be one of the most successful crosscultural activities that anyone on this island can embrace.
"I would hope that anything that I would do would reinforce areas of common ground of agreement," he says. "Traditional music, and particularly pipe music, is something that belongs to everybody. The majority of pipers when I was growing up were Protestants. Even though Armagh is a very ghettoised kind of town, I think the music is seen as just that. "There aren't many other activities in Armagh that are so strongly cross-community. Around here, you'd have as good a chance of hearing traditional music in the cricket or rugby club as you would in the GAA club."
One of Vallely's projects was the establishment of the William Kennedy Piping Festival, now in its seventh year. Welcoming pipers from well outside the Celtic pale, it's an event that seeks to nurture cross-fertilisation and celebrate diversity rather than venerate the past. "We're gradually working our way through all the different pipes we can find," he says, smiling at the unlikely turn of events that saw the festival move from strictly uileann pipes to all manner of exotic bellows. "We're now hearing of North African and eastern pipes from Belarus, and this year, we had pipers from Italy. Maybe some day if somebody gives us a pile of money, we'll have a real world piping festival."
A Work Of Art is a limited edition publication and is available solely from two galleries in Belfast: The Emer Gallery, 463 Lisburn Road, Belfast (tel: 048-9066 6912); and The Arches Gallery, 2 Holywood Road, Belfast (tel: 048-9045 9031). Price: £50
Brian Vallely's website: www.armaghpipers.com