Elizabeth Cope is best knows as a painter of bright, colourful pictures. She makes spontaneous, spirited sill lifes, views of interiors, animals, domesticated landscapes. A decorative painter, you might say. That sounds almost disparaging, but it shouldn't. The world's certainly a better place for the existence of good decorative artists. After all Matisse is a decorative painter and, it must be acknowledged, Cope's style owes a great deal to Matisse and to another decorative artist par excellence, Raoul Dufy.

Her Solomon Gallery show, just ending, gives a fair idea of this side of her work. It's a lively mix of pictures, spiced up with a number of fleshy nudes, including a more or less life-sized Eve who greets - and may startle - you on the stairs. She has experimented with cut-out formats, most dramatically in a big double portrait of a woman identified only as Brenda.

You do have a chance to see quite another side to Cope, though. She is one of two exhibitors in Images from Central America at Arthouse in Temple Bar, Dublin, until Friday July 3rd and later at other venues in Ireland. Her paintings hang alongside the black-and-white photographs of David Stephenson.

A few years ago, inspired by the war artist scheme in Britain, she persuaded Trocaire to let her travel to Somalia under its auspices, as artist-in-residence. This was something quite new and it was brave and imaginative of Trocaire to respond. In the event she made two trips to Somalia and produced a striking body of work. Then last year she set off for Central America, to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, again with Trocaire. She brought an enormous role of prepared artist's linen and a supply of paint, and she worked on the hoof. In a way, that's nothing new for her: she's always had a penchant for imrpomptu working arrangements.

The rationale for Stephenson's assignment is clear enough and his photographs are primarily a sympathetic record of people encountered and the wolrd they inhabit, from the street children in a shelter in Tegucigalpa, to the women in the vast Chiquita banana factory or the cane cutters in th harsh environment of the sugar plantations. The images sit comfortable in the tradition of documentary photography.

She responds with a painter's eye to a new environment, an eye that is hungry for detail, like her patient visual description of a cluttered electricity pole, or straightforward landscapes liek her view of the beach as Tela, or a terrific view of a coffee plantation, or studies of Mayan monuments. And, again and again, she too is engaged by individuals, by stories of hidden lives lived against the odds.