Artful Dodgers

Back home in landladyhouse starved of the attention of the lovely nurses, I find the only option is to go to bed as the TV isn't working and the four male occupants have given up on fixing it.

As I scroll through my messages I find photos of an exhibition I attended last Thursday. Sir Leigh and I saw two very different but significant players in Irish art. I feel an art critic moment coming on as my general anaesthetic does its wonders.

We decided to see John Doherty's show at the Taylor first, where his familiar and precisely rendered relics of Irish towns and villages are on show. From bookies to sweetshops to petrol pumps, his work may be acutely and architecturally conscious of linear detail, light and shade, but it is his mastery of colour that raises his quotidian subjects to quiet heroics.

Elsewhere, his treatment of the sea and its artefacts is as heroic as the little shops he foregrounds. The 'Buoys' series is a study in the dominant form, tactile engineering and rusted rivets fully realised, while the subordinate coils of rope and loops of chain sit like ghosts, bit players in the frame, their unadulterated form laid bare for contemplation.

Many red stickers later, John was in positive mood, with a show in Sydney on the horizon. 

The Oliver Sears Gallery around the corner was crammed with his many fans to view  the 'modello' of his major piece - giant haystack, not the wrestler, but an actual clochan shaped haystack, like they had in the old days before bails and now those big coils we see in fields. The full scale piece can be viewed in his studio in St Alphonsus Church, Drumcondra. Why talk about the haystack when there’s so much else going on this show ‘The Consideration of the Planets – everybody sidesteps the white paper figures on the landing, a knee-high horde marches upwards to an unseen room on the next level, Sir Leigh thinks they’re wrapped wine bottles. They’re a bit like the Ku Klux Klan. The artist’s wife tells me they are nuns walking towards a furnace. When Paper Figures showed in Paris, it was accompanied by music. This would be more powerful and focus us as their position on the landing doesn’t make for good viewing, when you stand back and look from the adjoining room you can make out the wimples turning to each other whispering, or looking down at the ground, and you wonder do they know where they're going.

There are works on paper, and his bronzes, but for sheer diversity, for Damien Hirst-style response, there’s Consumer Landscape, an installation of painted cans encased in open timber boxes.

I meet the blonde barrister/writer and note a few more from the bar in the room, I ask is it a bar outing and she reminds me the artist's wife is a barrister, aha. I wonder if there’s a collective noun for them, an argument of, a brief of?

Having spent the previous afternoon down at the Courts with my very first legal counsel and conducted an interview on Tuesday about my 2006 case in the European Court of Human Rights, I'm wondering, yet again, if this could be a new career. Another couple of years study, while I write. Who knows?