KATHLEEN Isabella Mackie, now in her 97th year, comes from a privileged back ground and thus, in the 1920s, as having demonstrated a more than average competence in art at Alexandra College, it must have seemed a natural course of things that she should attend first the Belfast College of Art and then the Royal Academy Schools in London, where her teachers included George Clausen, Sickert and William Orpen.
Holidays in the then fashionable parts of Tangier, the Loire Valley and Switzerland produced work in the spirit of the times. She took Amy Johnson, the celebrated aviatrix gliding. Her husband fished the Donegal rivers.
Thus this exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue sponsored in part by the Mackie family, opens a small window on to that now lost world through at times pleasant, but never remarkable, examples of what was the academically approved style of the era. Set pieces Boys Bathing, for instance recall the art schools studied formality others, the Irish landscapes, recall not surprisingly the work of Mildred Anne Butler and Frank McKelvey.
It is, Brian Kennedy's catalogue text would seam to argue, this painter's ability to reflect not any major talent, but rather her solidarity with the now unfashionable, which justifies the exhibition's existence.