PILE `EM HIGH, sell `em dear is the crutch which supports so much seasonal marketing whether it is for `white goods', VCRs, or the general Christmas mock-Victorian frippery which has led many of the north's Calvinists to quip, `no pot-pourri here'.
Gallery shows for December often take their lead too from Mammon, reckoning a glass or two of the mulled Merlot will help sell off many of their stable's less marketable canvases.
Not so at the Fenderesky, where a restrained 26 works by some 13 painters are splendidly and sensitively hung in one of the most attractive small shows of the year.
Michael Cullen contributes two jolly bright oils, further bright paragraphs in his long discourse on the artist as a cowboy, his model and the stetson, a.k.a., genitalia.
By contrast Felim Egan's Shore Line "c" and Shore Line "d" take us on down his familiar spare introspective estuarial threnody.
Richard Gorman's oil temperas, geometric segments executed too in an estuary's colours, are as controlled as ever while Clement McAleer, by contrast, tempts us past wind-brushed gorse to a sparkling wind-tossed sunlit sea.
