Camille Souter: The Mirror in the Sea by Garrett Cormican is an impressively weighty tome. It details Souter's life and work, from her birth in 1929 right through to her present life on Achill Island. While the text is written in a lively, engaging manner that blends biographical information with analysis of her paintings, the book also includes a vast amount of colour reproductions. Published by Whyte's auctioneers, it is a catalogue raisonne that is sure to lead to greater awareness of her works, most of which are in private collections and rarely seen in public.

While Souter is widely regarded as one of Ireland's foremost painters, her name is not as well known as other artists. Even when Cormican, as an art history student at Trinity College Dublin in 1998, decided to write his thesis on Souter, he knew little about her.

"Peter Cherry, my supervisor, mentioned Camille Souter's name to me, but I have to admit I wasn't really familiar with her work at all at that stage, " Cormican recalls. "The name sounded vaguely familiar, as it does to a lot of people when they hear it."

The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity had staged an exhibition of Souter's work in 1980, so he went there to find out more.

"When I saw the exhibition catalogue I was astounded . . . I was amazed that somebody was producing work of that quality in Ireland and that there wasn't a substantial publication on her."

Cormican wrote her a letter, asking if she would like to meet to discuss her work. But with the deadline for his thesis looming, there was still no word. Then, one day, he received a phone call from her out of the blue. "We met up and had a formal interview. Then we had a few drinks and we continued to talk about art and things in general, and we just became friends. That was how the whole thing kicked off, " says Cormican, who is himself a painter.

With the thesis complete, Cormican believed something more substantial needed to be written. "I felt at that stage that some eminent critic should be writing this, not a 22-year-old. But then, the information was in my hands, nobody else had it, and if I didn't do it . . . it would have felt to me almost immoral not to write about her, because I think painters of that quality should get the recognition they deserve."

The book does indeed reveal the remarkable range and inventiveness of her work.

Souter is a highly individual artist whose paintings cannot be categorised into any particular style or movement. She often uses unconventional materials and techniques and almost always paints on paper on a small scale. She has painted landscapes, still lifes and figurative works.

Themes such as childhood innocence and man's impact on nature pervade. Essentially, Souter seems to be seeking to understand the world around her and to represent what she has called the "core" of her subject matter. She is engaged in a continual search for meaning, an enquiry into what it means to be human.

The cover of Camille Souter: The Mirror in the Sea features a painting entitled 'Self-Portrait as a Cod's Head'. As Cormican notes in the introduction, "Camille Souter is a fish:

restless, elusive and hard to catch." His monograph is about as close as you'll get.

'Camille Souter: The Mirror in the Sea' by Garrett Cormican, /60