The KK Gallery is in an unlikely location, down a dodgy sidestreet behind the Morrison Hotel. It's very small and thus difficult to view the paintings if there's any kind of crowd there. And there's a very good crowd for Mick's show - and a very different crowd to the normal commercial galleries. It's very grungy and right on, and bereft of buyers I suspect. The first two faces I see are Roddy Doyle and Robert Ballagh, and there's John Kelly nearby. The rest of the crowd look like artists or NCAD lecturers and students.
The work is well wrought figurative painting, which I don't find very exciting. There's a number of depictions of small tables draped with white cloths - accurately executed but so what. There's a bizzare study of a tall bearded man wearing a blue skirt and naked from the waist up. He does floor boards well - there's plenty of them on view. There is little evidence of his recent stint in Paris - although maybe he met the guy in the blue skirt there - he wouldn't be out of place in Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre.
