A new book on Basil Blackshaw is an opulent study of a reclusiveartist whose vigour belies a dark edge to his work, writes Aidan Dunne.

While €250 does sound like a great deal to pay for a book on an Irish artist, Eamonn Mallie's Blackshaw is no ordinary book.

It is handsome and generous even by the increasingly high standards of art-book publishing, and it is by far the most ambitious and lavish monograph yet published on the work of a living Irish artist. A huge, square-format volume, it is a weighty, robust object, comes with its own slipcase and features over 200 colour plates.

All of these illustrations are printed on a gratifyingly large scale; none of your frustrating, postage-stamp sized reproductions here. So, apart from useful commentaries on the artist by Mallie, art critic Brian Fallon and gallery owner Dr Jamshid Mirfenderesky, what you have is essentially a Blackshaw retrospective between two covers. The earliest work reproduced is dated 1944 (and it's not half bad), the most recent pieces date from this year.

Mallie is a long-time Blackshaw enthusiast and for him the book has clearly been a labour of love, inspired by his passion for the painter's work. He has ranged far and wide to source paintings for inclusion. While the end result is, inevitably, a less than comprehensive collection, it is pretty impressive and certainly representative. Available in a limited edition of just 1000 signed copies it is also, on Mallie's part, a gesture of faith in Blackshaw's worth as a painter.

He does occupy a unique position in the Irish art world. Born in 1932, he is a perennial outsider, a one-off individualist who is grandly indifferent to artistic fashion.

He lives in the country, on a hillside close to Lough Neagh, looks on life from a rural perspective and doesn't take any part or interest in the urbanised art scene. Yet he is highly regarded by a wide spectrum of opinion, including his peers, critics and commentators, and a large band of collectors and enthusiasts. It's not an overstatement to say that he has something of a cult following.

It's easy to see why. He paints with great, unfailing freshness and vigour. There is an electrifying, nervous vitality to the best of his painting, and he has a gift for conveying the sense, even the essence, of the people, animals and things he paints, over and beyond literal description.

He is a great painter of landscape, of horses and dogs, of nudes, portrait subjects, still life and interiors. He brings to all of them a passionate engagement and a certain impatience, a dislike of the obvious, a horror of predictability and a distrust of facility. There is a distinct feeling in his paintings that in order to make an image you have to destroy it. The process has been very well described by Jude Stevens in an illuminating piece on her experiences as the painter's model and friend.

When you look at one of his paintings there sometimes an eerie sensation that beneath the flux of the surface brushwork you can almost make out an underlying, quasi-photographic image.

As a matter of fact, sometimes you literally can, because he has painted over photographs on more than one occasion, and it is safe to infer that elsewhere he has brusquely over-painted conventional representational images. It's as though he employs a kind of representational scaffolding that can be dispensed with once the structure of the painting is completed.

These implicit images are more likely to survive intact in the portraits, which include Michael Longley, Jennifer Johnston and Van Morrison as subjects and are, incidentally, very good. It is not so much that the portraits are more worked than other paintings, it is just that the evidence of work is more likely to be allowed to stand. Mind you, this doesn't apply to all the portraits. Some of them are audaciously elliptical by any standard.

In a sense, by the time we get to see a painting, the subject has flown the coop. We glimpse a trace, a few clues, but by virtue of Blackshaw's investment of time and attention, somehow we are left with an incredibly vivid, indelible impression of the thing itself, the bird on the wire, the dog, the horse, the barn, the figure.

His penchant for almost obliterating images was taken to a new level with the work he made for a solo show at the Ulster Museum last year. Here his subjects became traces of things and empty spaces rather than things themselves: clothes rather than people wearing them, blank windows and walls. These paintings, which come close to being paintings of nothing at all, are remarkably powerful.

For a painter with an apparently light touch and much given to flights of whimsy, his vision has a surprisingly dark edge to it. Perhaps this has something to do with the unsentimental hardness and cruelty of rural life. Writing in the current volume, Brian Fallon notes that, while they could be taken as playful, he finds a group of recent cowboy paintings quite sinister. Jamshid Mirfenderesky puts it in starker, striking terms: "Basil Blackshaw knows that the bottom of the world has fallen out and we are all just hanging on."

Blackshaw, edited by Eamonn Mallie, is published by Mainstage Ltd at €250, distributed by C.M.D. Dublin and is available from the Frederick Gallery, 01-6707055.