Tony O'Malley, painter, Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
St Ives painter with a Celtic dimension who returned to his native Ireland
23 January 2003
Tony O'Malley, painter: born Callan, Co Kilkenny 25 September 1913;
married 1973 Jane Harris; died Physicianstown, Co Kilkenny 20 January 2003.
The Irish painter Tony O'Malley, who lived in south-west Cornwall between
1960 and 1990, came to prominence as a St Ives painter in the shadow of
Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Roger Hilton and Patrick Heron. Like his
better-known colleagues, O'Malley abstracted landscape motifs in a cogent
and evocative way that struck associations with the anatomy of the figure.
After returning to live in Ireland in 1990, O'Malley went on to enjoy great
commercial success in a country always ready to fly the flag for its leading
artists.
Tony O'Malley was born in Callan, Co Kilkenny in 1913, the eldest of four
children. His father, Patrick, was a salesman and Sinn Fein activist. While
Tony always retained republican sympathies, he was essentially a pacifist
committed to the creative power of the arts. Apart from a stint of military
service in the Irish army in 1940, he spent most of the 1940s and 1950s
working as a clerk for the Munster and Leinster Bank. In 1943 he contracted
tuberculosis, and suffered from the effects of it on his health for the rest
of his life.
A painting holiday in St Ives during the mid-1950s, when he studied at
Lanyon's St Peter's Loft school, inspired him to throw caution to the winds.
After the death of his brother in 1958 and his retirement from the bank on
health grounds, he took the decision to move to Cornwall and paint
full-time.
O'Malley used the renowned art colony of St Ives, then in its post-war
heyday, both as a safe haven where his artistic ambitions stood realistic
chance of fulfilment and as a spa town for a middle-aged man in fragile but
retrievable health. He overcame fundamental health problems to lead a long,
active and eventually hugely successful career.
Essentially self-taught, he drew much from the artists around him, while
bringing a note of Gaelic mystery to the abstraction of St Ives art. The
ancient symbols and Celtic hieroglyphics that marked the surfaces of his
mature abstract paintings added a suitably Celtic dimension to a distinctive
school of painting that saw landscape as the outcome of long, slow
anthropomorphic evolution.
One of O'Malley's earliest St Ives paintings, East Wind, St Ives (1961),
with its abundance of luminous greys and browns, captured the desolate mood
and elemental mystery of winter seas common to both Cornwall and the Gaelic
west coast. A similar sombre mood characterised In Memory of Peter Lanyon
(1964), Hawk's Landscape (1965) and The Falcon's Eyrie (1965), compositions
that with their spiralling movement evoked an exhilarating feeling of space,
flight and freedom. His work of this time, with its broad and energetic
sweeps of paint and cavernous recesses or vertiginous spaces, indeed came
closer to Lanyon than anything done before or after.
A benign and popular presence in the often fractious St Ives art scene,
O'Malley evoked the protective and even maternal support of the many
well-wishers around him. As well as enjoying the critical support of Patrick
Heron, with whom he enjoyed a strong friendship, O'Malley was aided by many
others who helped him through assorted illnesses. In 1961 he suffered a
severe heart attack from which he recuperated at Eagles Nest, the Heron
family home at Zennor.
The following year he moved to Trevaylor House at Gulval near Penzance,
where he benefited from a lively social life that saw an endless stream of
visiting artists from St Ives and London. Owned by the wealthy painter Nancy
Wynne-Jones, Trevaylor was a Cornish Garsington or Charleston, accommodating
not just local but London artists, such as Bert Irvin or Denis Bowen.
On a professional level, too, O'Malley was an active player within many
local exhibitions. He joined the Penwith Society in 1962, exhibiting work
regularly thereafter. During the early 1960s, when galleries were less comme
rcial and more intimate environments than today, he enjoyed one-man
exhibitions at artist-run galleries such as Elena Gaputyte's Sail Loft
Gallery and Elizabeth Rainsford's Fore Street Gallery in St Ives.
By 1966, however, he had a solo show at Marjorie Parr's Chelsea gallery,
displaying work with this influential dealer in subsequent years. Soon after
he exhibited at the Peterloo Gallery in Manchester and at Cyril Gerber's
Compass Gallery in Glasgow. The solo shows with the Taylor Galleries in
Dublin from 1982 onwards established him alongside the likes of Bill Crozier
as one of the most collectable of Irish artists. An important book, Tony
O'Malley, written by Brian Fallon, was published in 1996. A major
retrospective at the Ulster Museum, Belfast and the Crawford Institute,
Cork, in 1984 consolidated O'Malley's status and his work was also included
in the landmark exhibition "St Ives 1939-64" at the Tate Gallery, London, in
1985.
Although spectacular when it did come, his success had come slowly. Between
1969 and 1989 he rented an Arts Council property, Seal Cottage, behind
Alfred Wallis's cottage in St Ives with views directly on to Porthmeor
Beach. In 1973 he married the much younger Canadian painter Jane Harris,
whose salubrious influence included winter visits to her family in the
Bahamas between 1974 and 1987. These trips had an important impact on
O'Malley's work, which took in the shape of flora or bleached light and
saturated colour of the Caribbean. Offering further evidence of a
Gauguinesque undercurrent running through O'Malley's seemingly charmed life,
the escapes to a sub-tropical paradise liberated his palette, which became
ever more audacious in breadth and intensity.
O'Malley would use a razor to deposit linear markings in the hardboard
supports he favoured. He was an artist who responded immediately to the
differing environments he encountered, and his works began as line drawings
in full sketchbooks. The large studio pictures were worked up from
Scillonian, Cornish, Canarian or Caribbean sketchbooks. The Caribbean aspect
of his oeuvre was celebrated in "Island & Ocean: Bahamas", a three-year
touring exhibition in England and Ireland that was initiated by John Halkes
at the Newlyn Orion Gallery, Penzance, in 1986.
O'Malley's final years were spent at Physicianstown, Callan, near his
birthplace. In 1993 the Irish president Mary Robinson conferred on him the
highest honour of the Aosdana (the Irish body which honours writers,
musicians and artists) - the status of Saoi; and in the following year he
was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin.