A Response to MACRO Senior Citizens Painting Group Exhibition

by Diana Bamimeke

I meet, for the second time, the painters behind a recent group show at the Complex, on an uncharacteristically sunny Tuesday morning in Dublin. The first time I made their acquaintance was upon seeing their works in MACRO: Senior Citizen Painting Group Exhibition. The works were fresh canvases from a weekly art class led by the visual artist Sibyl Montague, who’d taught the group for six and a half years. Each member of the group began painting later in life. Marriages weathered, children reared, a job after another after another. Now, the group members had time. That time was a two-hour chunk of a Tuesday, every week, give or take.

Early in the day, I cycle into town and join the group on the first floor of MACRO Community Resource Centre. The name gleams silver on the facade of its blocky grey building, which has been here since 2001, and I’m reminded that I can still be surprised by what my city has to offer. MACRO is a multipurpose community hub featuring meeting rooms, event spaces, a charity shop, clubs, and classes for all ages, as well as CV preparation support for job seekers. I marvel at the size of the centre and the pockets of activity seemingly everywhere I look, the welcoming buzz of a place that is for and by the community. I mention as much when I sit down to talk with the painting group members in attendance. One member, Olive Hartnett, informs me of the yoga and knitting classes she takes at MACRO alongside regular attendance at the painting group. Something for everyone, they concur.

The Complex is a five-minute walk from MACRO and its many offerings. Over four days in early April, the group exhibited their work for sale in the concrete-and-brick setting of The Complex’s gallery space. Despite differences in size and subject matter, the paintings shared an unselfconscious quality. There were still lifes, portraits, countryside scenes, painted bestiaries of flamingos, cats and crows, each reflecting the singular character of its artist. Idyllic rural life throughout the exhibition. Questions then pulled on me: why had a group of older artists, who’ve spent most of their lives in the urban environs surrounding the centre, painted so many farmers? Were these paintings cropped out of childhood memories of the west of Ireland? Or were they a form of urban wish fulfilment?

The answer was more practical than my psychoanalytic projections. I learned that the group would sift through reference images, taking one famous painting or another and making variations according to their mood that day. Indeed, I recognised the figuration, period costuming and brushwork of seventeenth-century Dutch painters and French impressionists throughout the exhibition. The specificity of Irish life depicted made me wonder what Irish painters, if any, had appeared in their references. Seán Keating came to mind, who painted the lifeways of Aran Islanders against the churn of Irish independence movements in the early twentieth century. I saw Keating’s Men of the West (1915) on a college trip and was especially struck by the presence of the man on the left of the image. His hat tilts low over a severe gaze, daring the viewer to question the nationalist character implied by the tricolour behind him and the shotguns the men carry.

 The rural figures in the MACRO exhibition were far less confrontational, yet their styles of dress echoed similar concerns. One canvas by Michael Maher maintained a different kind of emotional intensity in the context of rural Ireland. One of my favourites in the show was a narrow portrait of a woman in a black shawl, standing barefoot in misty, stark countryside. The billow of her skirt suggested movement, as if by the wind or by the interference of the goat beside her. She held a sling of crops or flowers to her chest, the cargo her attention temporarily drifted from as her gaze lifted up and out of the canvas. Two worlds cohabited here: this woman’s interior world–taken up with contemplation of a thing beyond the viewer’s sight–and the austere landscape that she presumably worked. Even the goats flanking her were stopped in their tracks, alert in that animal way. The mystery of the scene gave me room to speculate about the life she led, the encounters she had, like the one Michael had captured here.

How women fared once upon a time crops up in my conversation with the MACRO group. Valerie Moore, a painter who attends the class with her sister Jacinta Harris, recalls in detail the strictures of the Catholicism they were raised in. “You had to be married”, says Valerie. “That’s what they taught then.” She describes her own shotgun wedding and the litter of children and grandchildren that followed. I share my own dating woes, and Valerie offers sage advice: to let loose, to have my fun, to make mistakes while I still can, and damn what anyone has to say about it.  

This spirit of abandon, playfulness and self-determination manifested in my other two favourite works in the exhibition, both painted by Valerie. The first was an interior scene of a woman, arms folded, legs crossed and–like Seán Keating’s man of the west–staring directly at the viewer. Her belongings were neatly arranged around her: the golden-yellow chair she lounged in, bunched pale-yellow flowers on a pink-topped table, and a framed image on the wall beside a window letting out onto a riot of flowers in the garden. What are you doing here? her expression seemed to ask. This is my house! Whether a self-portrait or an imagined woman, Valerie’s painting asserted a sense of ownership and self-determination, hard-won through the gendered material conditions of her life. In showing and selling her artwork, she –not a state, not an institution –claims knowledge of herself and acts on it creatively.

Self-knowledge also includes a sensibility for what feels good, something the red-headed subject of Valerie’s second painting clearly understood. In this double portrait, the figure sat opposite a perfectly creamy-headed pint of Guinness, tongue stuck out in anticipation. Both drink and drinker setting off white-hot sparks, crackling with the electricity of their encounter. 

At the end of the class, the curator from the Complex arrives with an envelope of sale proceeds for each painter. I feel I’ve built enough of a rapport with the group to joke about spending it all down the pub. Jacinta laughs and the group begins to disperse, clearing away paint pots and phoning for lifts home. We say our goodbyes with big smiles and are reabsorbed back into the city.

Generations ago, in this same place, such an encounter between self-determined beings of different ages, genders and ethnicities might have been inconceivable, not least the part where older women’s labour is acknowledged fully and compensated fairly. And, only a short walk away, was the area of north inner-city Dublin known in the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries as the Monto, a short-lived red light district home to women deemed bearers of social contagion. Their stories of economic wayfinding ran parallel, in some ways, to the lives of the women before me now.

On the bike ride home, I stop in Ballybough for a smoke, reflecting on the day’s enriching exchanges, with art and with others. A vision of myself creating as unburdened as the MACRO group enters my mind; I linger in the thought, allowing my attention to be captured by the encounter.

Diana Bamimeke was the MLP x The Complex writer in residence from March – July 2025.
MACRO Senior Citizen Painting Group Exhibition was exhibited from 04 - 06 April at The Complex. More information can be found here.
Photos by Sibyl Montague. Courtesy of the artist and The Complex, Dublin