Jack Pakenham's Troubles paintings

Spent part of today in Omagh, the Strule Arts Centre where they're showing work by the Belfast artist Jack Pakenham. I've recorded a half hour Artsextra special on him for next week. As we sit in the gallery space, all around us a selection of political paintings he did from 1975-2008. It's called "Here it is".

They're angry, violent, anguished works. Vivid reds and oranges slash across the canvases, there are dark areas, political slogans, balaclavas, black berets, grotesquely contorted bodies in the final agonies of death.

The painting shown is called "Ulster at the Crossroads".

He says he was angry painting them.

Angry at what was happening on his doorstep.

Angry that in the early sixties he had felt an uplift, exhilarated by Belfast's cultural vibrancy. It's 1963, the very first Belfast festival at Queens is on, he's in a flat with Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon reading early poems in Philip Hobsbaum's famous group.

Then the landscape is devastated in 1969 and the start of The Troubles.

His anger continues. Angry that he and his wife were in the Abercorn restaurant 20 minutes before the bomb went off. What happened to the old lady they had shared a table with? Or the girls behind the counter he was joking with less than half an hour earlier? He and his wife vowed from that day on they would never go into town together again. Just in case anything happened, at least their boys would have one parent.

While he was doing these paintings, a "catharsis" he calls it, he was holding down a full time job. English teacher, later Head of Department, at Ashfield Boys High School in East Belfast.

Over lunch, he's full of anecdotes. He remembers one of his pupils, a certain Terri Hooley, trying to disrupt the class he was teaching and being told by his teacher that if he didn't quieten down, Mr Pakenham would insert his boot somewhere. I give you the abridged, cleaned up version. According to Jack, Terri's version of events is even more colourful!

He talks fondly of artist Gerard Dillon taking him under his wing to hearing Seamus Heaney read "Follower" for the first time.

His energy is infectious. This is the man who, at 71 years of age, still does cartwheels in the Empire music club. Somebody in the club one night, telling him he was a great dancer, went on to remark they had just heard he was a painter and that apparently he wasn't bad at it!!

We leave him on Market Street, heading off to see if any of his more recent work on show at the McKenna Gallery has sold. He looks like he could do his famous cartwheels but then he's just had lunch.

"Here it is" is on at the Strule Arts Centre, Omagh until 20th April.