Better known as a writer, George Russell was also an able painter, albeit one enthralled by the mystical, writes Aidan Dunne.

Even from an early age, George Russell (AE) was sensitive to the presence of other-worldly spirits, William Butler Yeats recalled, having studied with him at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Belief and interest in such spirits remained a lifelong preoccupation for AE. He became subject to vivid, hallucinogenic visions. He joined the Dublin Theosophical Society, and his engagement with mysticism, and mystical creatures, was central to his creative work across several disciplines, most notably poetry and painting.

Latterly, Dublin's Oriel Gallery has consistently shown his work. But within a decade or so of his death in 1935, his matter-of-fact depictions of dainty fairy-tale beings and mythical beasts in candy-floss colours tended to push his work slightly beyond mainstream consideration, in the way that fantasy and sci-fi is usually corralled away from literary fiction in bookshops and libraries.

Russell may have been relatively extreme in his mystical convictions but the general tenor of his interest was by no means unusual for his time. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of that fictional champion of reason, Sherlock Holmes, was all too willingly duped by a mocked-up photograph of fairies in a garden. And of course WB Yeats himself was a fellow theosophist.

Perhaps things haven't changed that much. Now fantasy, in the guise of Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, or the latest Terry Pratchett, tops the bestseller lists, while Lord of the Rings and, again, Harry Potter, have made fantasy respectable in mainstream cinema. Hardly surprising, given that surveys continually throw up disconcerting statistics about the sizeable majority of Americans who believe in angels and alien abductions. Against this background, perhaps AE's peacock-haired serpents, wood sprites and radiant angels won't raise that many eyebrows.

A new exhibition at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, George Russell (AE), aims at providing us with a chance to look at his paintings with a fresh eye. Given that the show features works borrowed from 25 different collectors - a huge logistical undertaking - we are not likely to see anything like it again for a long time.

Sadly, the exhibition will not be seen by the woman who devised it and did an enormous amount of work to bring it to fruition, Diana Beale. She died last September after a relatively short, debilitating illness. By then she had spent seven years researching Russell, tracking down and viewing more than 450 of his paintings.

Her passion for Russell's work was, she said, an example of what he himself termed "Spiritual Gravitation". AE had been a friend of her grandfather, Edward MacLysaght, and she had gradually become curious about his painting. Since his pictures are widely dispersed throughout several parts of the globe, her quest entailed a great deal of travelling.

Worse, from an historical point of view, he didn't date his paintings and was indifferent to how they were titled, usually leaving it to others to provide names. In the absence of real records, it's not even possible to arrive at a reasonable estimate of how many paintings there are. He was famously generous about giving his work as presents.

Diana's hopes of writing a book on him remained, alas, unfulfilled. But before she died, she entrusted her son, Marcus, with the task of bringing the exhibition to completion, which he has done very effectively.

AE DERIVED HIS name from the Gnostic mystical term Aeon (the truncation was the result of a printer's error, which he obviously liked). He was born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, in 1876, though he was still a youngster when the family moved to Dublin. Given his penchant for mystical communion, it is worth remembering that there was also an enormously practical side to his talents. He worked very effectively as an advocate for the farming co-operative movement, and in journalism as a writer and editor.

As an art critic, he argued early on that the Irish cultural scene should be opened up to outside developments, while also pointing to the lack of an indigenous school of painting - by contrast with the writing of the Literary Revival.

His hopes that the one would encourage the other did not work out, and his own appetite for outside artistic influences proved extremely limited. His voice featured among the chorus of disapproval that greeted the Dublin showing of an edited version of Roger Fry's exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1911. He remained a vociferous, if anonymous (he used another pseudonym) critic of modernism until quite late in the day, when he did genuinely mellow somewhat in his views.

But by then, in any case, he was easing out of Irish artistic life. When his wife died in 1932 he moved to Bournemouth. In his own work, he remained very much an artistic conservative, with even his extravagant flights of fancy conceived within the terms of staid pictorial convention.

There is a tendency to regard him as an amateur artist and, while that is not strictly the case, there is a certain logic to the view. Painting was largely a spare-time activity, often when he was on holiday in Donegal. Then, although he was quite prolific, and was certainly capable, he was in many respects a lazy painter. Yeats observed that at art school AE didn't bother with the laborious business of drawing from life, preferring to make up figures from his imagination, which may well account for the frequent weakness of the figures. Which is not to say that he couldn't render figures and faces very well when he bothered. There is a great deal of evidence that he could. He had real technical facility but didn't need to work hard to achieve it. He drew very well and could make a convincing portrait head.

The problem with his mystical visions is that they turn out to be not half fantastic enough. At their worst they are hackneyed, twee, saccharine concoctions that verge towards kitsch.

In fact, probably the most eerie effect in his paintings is presumably accidental. In The Incoming Tide, the figures of two nude girls on a shore are superimposed on the half-visible forms of two ghostly, walking figures beneath. It's considerably more subtle than any of AE's consciously contrived attempts to convey a sense of the spirit world.

Yet lest all this sound unduly negative, it is only fair to emphasise his strengths. Apart from the fact that he did have real facility, and painted fluently and well without undue fuss, he was clearly as engaged by the landscapes and skies of Donegal as he was by visions of fairies and sea beasts.

In her selection, Diana Beale very wisely did not get carried away with the fantastic side of his imagination. In fact, if any one facet dominates in her selection, it is landscape. Here AE could be lax as well, relying on formulaic renderings of sunny forest glades with a couple of broadly indicated figures at leisure. But there is no mistaking his descriptive ability in terms of the atmospherics of light and texture. His accounts of evening skies, empty strands, distant hills and mountain bogs acquit themselves very well. This exhibition may not engender a major overhaul in views of AE as a painter of the Celtic Twilight, but it is hugely enjoyable and a worthy showcase of his considerable talent.

• George Russell (AE) is at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, The Mall, Sligo, until June 4 (071-9141405).