It is too easy, now, to look at Lynn Donoghue’s portraiture, currently on view at David Mirvish books (appropriately, since she has been repeatedly touted by Mirvish and the once-director of his 1970s gallery, Alkis Klonaridis), as conservative. Arguments against that designation are easily found in actual responses to initial showings of the late local icon’s work — a series of lusciously, lovingly painted male nudes that first met with a degree of puritanical outcry — or in her own declared influences, namely Hals, Manet and Velasquez, painters with whom she shares a rambunctious, innovative spirit more than a technique. (Donoghue is very much a modern portraitist, her gestural approach recalling Alice Neel or David Hockney.)

The Mirvish exhibit consists of a grouping of paintings of other artists with whom she shared Toronto in the ’70s and ’80s, among them Stan Denniston, Ric Evans, Tonie Leshyk and Janice Gurney, and of accompanying works by those artists. Aside from being a window into a scene that has all but disappeared from collective memory, the show provides a satisfying taste of Donoghue’s colourful commitment to the concept of spirit in portraiture. Perhaps as famous for her sittings as for their end result, Donoghue painted from life, and one gets a sense from her work that, even though she is evidently informed by variations of personality, her practice eagerly slotted subjects into her own, wild aesthetic universe. A trio of paintings hung side-by-side (Denniston, June Clark and Gurney), for example, shows almost identical expressions, with distinct features vanishing into Donoghue’s passion for broad strokes, glints of light on skin and big, expressive lips, eyes and nostrils. In this sense the self-portraits of this show become its focal point. One is a tentative sketch in which the full-bodied artist looks frankly at her own gaze from the side. Another is a cartoonish, life-sized cut-out of the artist with hands on her hips in a red and orange–striped turtleneck dress. It is a hilarious iteration of the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of self-confrontation — and, seemingly, of moving forward as an artist when one is committed to such perennial, canny themes.