From frames about eight-foot high, assorted faces regard the viewer with at most a mild amusement. For the staid Ulster Museum, this is a quirky exhibition. A Belfast Telegraph delivery boy called Andrew, the poets Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, American trumpeter Spanky Davis; the now octogenarian choreographer Helen Lewis, who survived Auschwitz: hardly a classic northern cross-section, and nothing like portraits commissioned by business, worthy bodies or wealthy individuals, writes Fionnuala O Connor
It may be fanciful to say that these Neil Shawcross paintings lift the whole glum museum building, but not by much. The city's nearest thing to a public gallery, it is woefully short of hanging space, long overdue a now imminent refurbishment. The Bolton-born Shawcross has painted in many styles: colourful still lives and others turn up in places as various as Bewley's Hotel Ballsbridge, Ulster Television headquarters and the Carroll factory, Dundalk.
Most of his portraits are too big for any but mammoth rooms. He keeps the majority. They are what he was meant to do, he has decided: painted without negotiation, to his own specification. On show for the first time in his 65th year as a set of 33, it shines out that he chooses his sitters, not they him.
An elegant catalogue essay by Liam Kelly notes his assertion that he always judges a book by its cover, is attracted to things and people by their "immediate sensory and graphic qualities". There has to be something about a person, "demeanour, appearance, persona and body language", for him to want to paint them.
"He doesn't need to know his intended subject. He talks about a tension being created between himself and the subject."
One still slightly baffled "subject" remembers Shawcross's good-humoured persistence, and how far the sitting was from any romantic cliche about the making of art: "A room in the ghastly arts college, the ceiling discoloured from an old rain leak. He was good at putting you at your ease, not unlike a doctor or dentist."
Shawcross only retired last year from teaching in the former arts college, now part of the University of Ulster. He has always sounded baffled when asked why he continued to teach having become an established artist, insisting he got as much as his students from it.
His mature portrait-style, for example - lone figures on a stage, painting dwindling below the shoulders, hands, feet, even clothes often unfinished or no more than suggested: direct observation from classes with young children, some with learning difficulties.
The commissioned exceptions in the museum are two of his earliest efforts: Francis Stuart the writer with a rabbit on his knee and the first non-unionist lord mayor of Belfast, the Alliance party's David Cook, perched on ceremonial chair. The young Cook, Alliance's champion nearly three decades ago, is the only politician in the room. The rest are a mix of colleagues from art and teaching, friends, random acquaintances, several people who inhabit or have inhabited his everyday world. A slightly severe-looking man looking over glasses on a chain is "Eddie," further identified as "EJ McGeown, security man" from the art college campus. Albert Anderson in white chef's jacket, wary and tired, ran the cafe and ice-cream parlour for years in Hillsborough where Shawcross lives. The best-known figures are most at ease: the quizzical David Hammond, singer and film-maker, a longtime friend; Seamus Heaney and Solly Lipsitz, "jazzman", both met soon after Shawcross arrived from England to be a part-time teacher; the poet Michael Longley; photographer Bobbie Hanvey, another friend, whose portrait of Shawcross introduces the catalogue.
Helen Lewis belonged to the theatre world dominated by the legendary Mary O'Malley, founder of the Lyric theatre - who got Shawcross to take those Saturday art classes in the Lyric rehearsal rooms. One Belfast family treasures his classroom sketch of their three striking children. "Praised them no matter what they did," says their father. Comparatively few women "trigger that x factor he often experiences with the male figure", Kelly writes.
But Shawcross thinks Lewis and the three other women on show here are among his strongest portraits. The painter Elizabeth Taggart - mask-like white face, big black hat, dark glasses and slash of carmine mouth - is on the cover of the exhibition's handsome catalogue. Sardonically observing arrivals from just inside the gallery, she is the first sighting before Longley and Heaney at right angles to each other, and posed masterfully as so often in life; Heaney in his straw boater, Longley dandified in white suit.
Painter Renata Mooney in another impressive hat looks on, inscrutable.
There are no temperamental-artist tales about Shawcross, a benign presence around Belfast at his beloved jazz concerts and the odd reading by a visiting detective novelist.
A Bolton man who has given four decades to his adopted town, these towering faces of his testify to the plurality of a place so often depicted as obsessive and narrow.