Imma has started to run art workshops, with a drop-in studio, for older people. Anne Dempsey gets a flavour of things.
Artist Claire Halpin ends an illustrated talk on some of her large canvasses which she works on by laying them on her studio floor in Stoneybatter, and invites questions. After queries on technique and materials comes one particularly relevant to her audience.
"Have your back or knees gone yet?" asked someone mid-room with feeling. "Not yet," is the reply to laughs all round.
Studio 10 Art Workshops for Older People take place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) each Friday morning. It's a drop-in programme: you don't have to book nor attend every week.
However, judging by the attention Halpin received, most participants are keen to catch each session. The artist selects family photographs to explore how we deal with loss through memory. She pioneers a layered approach which involves thickly varnishing an enlarged copy of the original, allowing its top surface to be stuck to canvas for sanding and painting. This produces a somewhat buried image with a degree of separation from the original, similar she suggests to the way memory can both unify and separate us from an original experience.
Clare Halpin leads the "Studio 10" workshop with Chris Jones of Imma's mediation team. Participants visit the gallery for discussion about the art work, and can work on their own projects in studio, or with Halpin on new projects. There will also be visits to resident artists' studios. There is no charge, basic materials are provided, and no previous experience is necessary. Back in studio - two rooms each with a large trestle table in the museum courtyard - participants take an animated tea break. The wall at one end is a kaleidoscope of colour, pinned up in response to last week's invitation to make free with paint.
"There are three main components to the programme - theme, discussion and hands-on. We normally have about 30 people, including professional and amateur artists, and those who have not painted, but are interested," explains Chris Jones.
"The first week we had a tour of the gallery. On week two we opened things up with basic work in black and white. Last week we used acrylics in free expression as you can see, and this week we have lecture and discussion. The idea is to expose everyone to work in and around the museum and have them respond in a variety of ways. The museum is for everyone. Our aim is for people to feel they can relate to what they see in whatever way is right for them. At the beginning, some said 'I can't draw, I won't be any good', but now, particularly after last week, there is an excitement, people are saying 'this is great'."
Artist, patchworker and embroiderer Monica Tierney from Blackrock, Co Dublin, hasn't missed a week. She works in oils and fabric, her focus more visual than craft. "My needle is my paint brush, my threads are my oils. Coming here gives freedom within a sense of order. I think as an artist you can always free up."
Another participant is a primary school teacher on a sabbatical hoping to return with more art ideas for the children. A third adapted WH Auden when asked what she thought of the Friday workshop. "It's the Sunday in all my week," she says.
After tea, Halpin asks people to divide into groups to respond to a gallery's current exhibitions which they have already visited. Inner Worlds Outside, an international touring show, brings together some 140 works by established mainstream artists and other artists from the fringes of society and aims to question the problematic distinction between insider and outsider art.
The group is invited to discuss the exhibition in one of five categories - fantastic dreams and fairy tales, imaginary landscapes, the erotic body, faces and masks, and the allure of language. People begin to fill large sheets of paper with words, ideas and drawings (some rather rude).
Liverpudlian James Gantlon, a portrait artist in Covent Garden for 20 years, has lived here since 1991. These days he sells his pencil drawings on Grafton Street. Does he do well? "Yes, when the police don't move me on," he says.
At the other end of the table, Jean Brady, 69, from Walkinstown has been coming to Imma since 1991 as a member of St Michael's Art Group, Inchicore, invited by Helen O'Donoghue, senior curator/head of Education & Community Programme. "Truthfully, when I looked at some of the modern stuff I thought it was rubbish. But as the years went on, I began to see the paintings in a different light," says Brady.
St Michael's attended the gallery regularly for tuition, discussion and workshops, have had gallery exhibitions, curated and acted as guides. "Last week I filled my paper with one big mass of colour. I loved it. I was at home for 40-odd years and reared my family. Now it's my time. This place is like a second home to me," she says.
Studio 10, Fri 10am-1pm until Dec 15, 2006, Jan 19-May 25, 2007. Contact Education & Community curator (01-6129912) and see www.stoneybatterstudio.com
