Mayo artist Val McLoughlin returns to home ground
There's a particular kind of homecoming that only makes sense with distance behind it. For Ballina-born artist Val McLoughlin, that distance was decades in the making – a departure for Cork School of Art in the 1970s and, eventually, a return to the town that shaped him first.
That return has left its mark. Val's commitment to local arts led to the founding of a weekly life drawing class at Ballina Arts Centre – still running today, more than 15 years on.
Never one to stand still, he later returned to study Contemporary Art Practices at ATU, sharpening a practice that continues to evolve.
Today, Val works principally in abstraction, though 'principally' undersells the range of what he does. He paints in oils, watercolour and mixed media, and is also a skilled printmaker in wood and lino cut, frequently combining techniques within a single piece.
Running alongside the visual work is a lifelong love of writing and poetry. Val is a founding member of the Ox Mountain Poets, and that literary instinct threads through his art, where words and images sit easily together.
Over the years his work has been shown extensively, in group and solo exhibitions across Mayo and Cork, nationwide, and further afield in Northern Ireland, the UK and the USA.
'Marks, strokes and space' is a phrase Val often reaches for when he talks about his own work, and it's one that curator and writer Ian Wieczorek has used as the title of an accompanying essay on two exhibitions McLoughlin currently has on display in Ballina.
The roots of Quarters lie in drawings Val made over four years, from 2016 to 2020, on regular trips to the River Moy near his birthplace, returning again and again, in every season and every kind of weather, to keep a kind of visual diary. As Val has put it, the aim was simply to 'catch something'. It wasn't until 2020 that he began translating those studies into paint, and the resulting works, made over the past six years, carry the restlessness of that long process of looking, reworking and refining rather than settling into any single, uniform style.
Out of Ink offers a companion piece to that body of work. Made using Chinese inks on Japanese Ho Sho paper, with a palette built mostly around black and red, the exhibition brings a more unified, calligraphic energy – landscape and gesture meeting in fast, immediate mark-making.
Where Quarters is slow and layered, Out of Ink is quick and direct, though Wieczorek notes the two share the same underlying visual sensibility.
Seen together, the exhibitions trace both a record of recent years and a retrospective pull back toward earlier memory - a crossroads, as Val describes it, of past and present, 'an exhibition as journey'.
For anyone in Ballina and beyond, it's a rare chance to see the full range of one of the town's most loved artists, at a moment when his work feels especially rooted in home.
Quarters is on display in Ballina Arts Centre until September 26, while Out of Ink is on display in Ballina Library until August 27. Admission is free and all are welcome.
(With thanks to Ian Wieczorek, visual artist, curator and writer, whose essay 'Marks, Strokes and Space' accompanies the two exhibitions.)