Profile °13 – TONY O’MALLEY

 essay by Peter Murray; intros by Jay Gates, Jean Kennedy Smith

ISBN 978 0946846 450     48 pages (paperback)    22.5x22.5cm    30 illus

Tony O’Malley’s unique and highly identifible style of painting earned him the position of being one of Ireland’s best-known and best-loved artists. His ability to infuse his paintings with the atmosphere and essence of wherever he found himself – whether dark and brooding or vivid and hopeful – was his particular strength. This book takes the reader through the artist's developing style, beginning with his earliest figurative works from the 1950s through to the present. In an extended essay by Peter Murray takes us through the artist’s struggles to emerge as a full-time, self-taught professional artist, his disillusioned departure from Ireland, his move to Cornwall, the development of his career in St Ives, and his eventual return to Co Kilkenny.

EXTRACT

"An artist charged with an extraordinary sensitivity and a restless memory, the painter Tony O’Malley, has, over the past half-century, provided a window into an Ireland caught in the warp and weft of history and imagination. Partaking of the atmosphere of Brian Merriman’s seventeenth-century poem The Midnight Court, his art reveals a world of uncertain realities, hovering between the conscious and the unconscious. O’Malley is himself a man of opposites: a self-taught artist who is yet receptive to new international movements in art, an astute observer of contemporary life, who, at the same time, brings the past to life with a sense of immediacy and presence. His life has, to a great extent, determined and shaped his art, and yet his paintings transcend time and place in their universal language of colours, rhythms and textures...
          Every painting is a distillation of experience and place, where memory interweaves with the present moment: ‘I think I can be very obscure; obscure because of my own sort of tussle to get at this ‘other’, to get up from the bottom of things. I could be accused of being hermetic or whatever it is, but I think the unconscious comes into it, rules it it in some way. In fact, I would love to come to a time before I stop – before something stops me from painting – in which I could just let fly again with paint. I think every painter wants to do that – suddenly, like a bomb, to explode – and yet you are hemmed in by the actual discipline. You are inside that.’

— from the essay by Peter Murray

Their [O’Malley’s paintings] unassuming modesty has grown to represent, for me, a quintessential Irishness, not only in the incisions of history within their weathered scapes, but in the way they grow in emotive weight with frequently renewed acquaintance.   — Jo Allen, Circa

O’Malley soaks up the atmosphere of a place in odd, detailed, unpredictable ways ... He carries not only Ireland, but all the places he has been, around with him. His paintings have earned him a place as one of the foremost and best-liked Irish artists of the 20th century.   — Aidan Dunne, Irish Times

see also Works °14 - Tony O'Malley