Tony O’Malley (1913-2003)


Life
b. 23 Sept. [var. 25]; b. Callan, Co. Kilkenny, son of sewing machine sales and native of Co. Clare; ed. Christian Brothers School, Callan, to 1934; started work at bank, and joined Irish Army in 1939; contracted pneumonia and quit army with ill-health; re-entered bank service with Leinster and Munster Bank, but painted secretly; posted at Kenmare, Buttevant, and Mountrath; exhibited with Living Art; contracted TB; inmate at sanitorium in Kilkenny, and later convalescent in Linden House, Blackrock;
 
posted at Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford; suffered death of mother, 1954, and of brother Matt, 1957; went on painting holiday to St. Ives, 1955, and met artists incl. Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Bryan Winter, returning again in 1957; retired from bank for reasons of heath, 1958, and settled on St. Ives, 1960; suffered heart attack, 1961; met Jane Harris (b. Montreal), 1970, and m. 1973; visited Bahamas, where Jane’s br. lived, from 1974; returned to Ireland in the summers from 1970s onwards;
 
settled in former labourer’s cottage at Physicianstown, nr. Callan, 1990; introduced to George McClelland by F. E. Williams; touring exhibition; RTÉ documentary, Places Apart; exhibited regularly at the Taylor Gallery; received award of Irish American Cultural Institute; elected Saoi of Aosdana, 1993; DLitt, TCD, 1994; IMMA/Dimplex award for sustained contrib. to visual arts, 1999; freedom of Kilkenny, 2000; retrospective exhibition, IMMA, Jan. 2002; d. 20 Jan. 2003.

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Works
‘Inscape: life and landscape in Callan and county Kilkenny’ in Kilkenny: History and Society, ed. W. Nolan & K. Whelan (Dublin, 1990), pp 617-32 [noticed in Whelan in ‘Reading the Ruins: The Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape’, in Surveying Ireland’s Past [...] ed. Howard B. Clarke, et al., 2004 - remarking that O’Malley ‘borrows ‘“Inscape” from Gerard Manley Hopkins to conceptualise this circuit between the material world and the imagination’ [see copy attached].


Some Paintings by Tony O’Malley
The Artist’s Room - Ferrybank, Arklow, Co. Wicklow
 
Cottages - St. Martins, 1972
 
The Pond - Physicianstown, Co. Kilkenny
 
Field with Crows and Dark Sky - Physicianstown (1985)

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Criticism
Aidan Dunne, ‘Portrait of the Artist’, Irish Times Magazine (11 Aug. 2001), pp.14-19; ‘Artist’s Unique Vision Triumphed Over Illness’ [obituary], in The Irish Times (Sat. 25 Jan. 2003), with photo-port. in seated in Kilkenny studio, Aug. 2001 [see infra].

Brian Lynch, [intro.], Tony O’Malley, with contribs. by Aidan Dunne (Aldershot: Scolar Press [assoc. with Butler Gallery] 1996), 324pp.; and Do. [new edn.] (Dublin: New Island 2004), 250pp.; David Whittaker, Tony O’Malley: An Irish Artist in Cornwall (Waverstone Press/Columba Mercier 2005), 96pp.

See also Guardian obituary by David Whittaker [infra].

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Quotations
Secret life: ‘That part of your life you kept secret, kept it hidden from them [banking colleagues]. There was a certain fear also of ridicule - that you were setting yourself up as an artist and only somebody with a very foreign name would make a pretence of being that. And in Ireland in the 1950s, there wa a general feeling that art or painting didn’t matter.’

Further: ‘It was very suffocating period. I mean one of the things about being in lodgings with my fellow-lodgers was the difficulty of discussing anything with them. They could argue about everything but they wouldn’t discuss anything. You’d be shourted down, and everything was potential heresy.’ ‘I liked the kind of psychological freedom of Cornwqall, where painters were accepted - many different kinds of course, all kinds; but painting itself was accepted as a human activity with many different facets.’ (Both quoted in obituary, The Irish Times, 25 Jan. 2003.)

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Notes
John F. Deane “The Dromedary Caravans” in The Instruments of Art (2005), with dedication: “in memory of artist Tony O ’Malley”.

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