JOHN McSORLEY has been described as 'Ireland's painter of the night'. He lives and paints in a small cottage overlooking Strangford Lough in County Down. Although not all his paintings are nocturnes, a great many represent early morning, evening or night. Most of his pictures are essentially rural in content, poetically romantic, but never sentimental. Working mostly in the evening and at night, he makes his pictures buzz and shimmer with reflected light - moonlight flitting on a distant sea, spangles of light cascading from a rising moon and falling on a wooded hillside. There is. a luminous and mysterious feel to most of his work - some paintings are almost magical in content.

McSorley scours poetry collections and anthologies in an attempt to match a verse, or even a few lines, to each of his pictures -like The Garden by Moonlight, where he depicts his own garden cast in an eerie light playing on the waves of snowdrops on the lawn:

'And moonbeams drooping thro' the coloured wood Are full of little people winged white.'

Francis Ledwidge

Or the dreamlike vision of Strangford by night - a small boat in full sail is reaching up the narrow channel, a crescent moon rising on the far horizon:

'And rise, 0 moon, from yonder down Till over down and over daleAll night the shining vapour sail And pass the silent-lighted town.'

Lord Tennyson

And in the beautifully atmospheric Midnight at the Accademia bridge, Venice, people crossing the Grand Canal seem to dissolve, like the bridge itself, into the confusion of mist and light:

'I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand;I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand.'

Lord Byron

McSorley is not a prolific painter; unlike some artists who seem to flood the market with pictures of great similarity, he produces only about thirty paintings a year, making each picture unique. He often returns to a painting over a period of years until he is completely happy with it, yet his work is still surprisingly affordable. Painting exclusively in oils, each picture records a memory of a vista glimpsed, perhaps while strolling in a country lane on a starry night.

PADRAIC FIACC