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‘Easy on the eye’ is an initial reaction. But then on second and subsequent viewings … ‘Look at that light!’ … ‘The startling freshness … the strength of colour …’

Flack’s love affair with nature and the outdoors from early childhood has in adulthood been the entire focus of his painting career of over 30 years.

In this Spring of record blossom this exhibition includes ‘Drifts of Snowdrops’ and another of our first earliest blooms the lesser celandine ­ it’s star-like bright yellow suggests a young child wide-eyed with the wonder of the world.

Golden Gorse by a Kerry River’ celebrates the luxuriance of our most readily identified wild shrub. Perhaps it is an indication of a good year for Kerry football. The colours are right!

The driven purity of ‘A Bank of Bogcotton’ is in stark contrast with our image of black turf. Mountain meadows are a hidden treasure of wild flowers. ‘Daisy Meadow’ and ‘Poppy Meadow’ reflect flowers that appear after land has been disturbed.

James H. Flack is endlessly fascinated with our constantly changing weather … ‘Cumulus Cloud Drifts’ … ‘Gleams of Spring Sunlight’ … ‘Mantle of Snow’ … ‘Flooding in Autumn’.

Flack’s flowers and weather are always set in a familiar landscape. These days deciduous woodlands have an extensive carpeting of bluebells so evocatively captured in ‘Soft May Morning in the Woods’ and the startling uniqueness captured in ‘Burren Gryke’.

‘Drifting Clouds at Evening’ might be the still after the storm - it’s vast sky an entirely appropriate closing scene for ‘Gone with the Wind’. Is ‘Stillness of Evening‚ Gap of Dunloe’ nature resting … or preparing? ‘A Wintery Road’ has the reality of danger and severity‚ and the romanticism of Christmas.

The closest James Flack gets to people is in his paintings of some of the buildings of another era. What stories might be told by the red brick archway in ‘Pathway to the Secret Garden’? What thrift and hardship were witnessed in the ‘Haggard Corner’?

The stone cottage in ‘From Days Gone By’ is straight out of the era of The Valley of the Squinting Windows. While a decaying iron gate‚ furze and a fully blossoming whitethorn are now blocking ‘The Old Way to the Fields’ the mass of the great stone pillars suggest ‘relics of ould dacency’.