Tony O'Malley HRHA (1913-2003)
Death by Water, from 'The Waste Land' - The Sea Silence
Oil on board, 122 x 61cm (48 x 24'')
Signed, inscribed and dated (19)'84 verso

Although he was born...

Tony O'Malley HRHA (1913-2003)
Death by Water, from 'The Waste Land' - The Sea Silence
Oil on board, 122 x 61cm (48 x 24'')
Signed, inscribed and dated (19)'84 verso

Although he was born in Callan, Co Kilkenny, in 1913, Tony OMalley always regarded himself as being from, and belonging to, two places: the Norman domain that incorporated Callan, his mothers territory, and the old Gaelic world of Clare Island, his fathers family home.

One of the most celebrated Irish artists of the 20th century, OMalley was a modest, self-taught, quietly industrious painter. When he was 19, he went to work for the then Munster & Leinster Bank. Around 1945 he was diagnosed with TB, and it was during his long convalescence that he began to paint. A holiday in Cornwall in 1955 introduced him to the thriving, international artists colony in St Ives and, after premature retirement from the bank on health grounds, he eventually took the plunge and moved there.

Gradually he developed his artistic voice, a form of representational abstraction that, following Gerard Manley Hopkins, he referred to as inscape rather than landscape. It is generally agreed that he made his best work in the 1980s. His pictorial grammar included an array of angular, darting, rhythmic forms, variously evoking the movement of fish in water and the movement of water itself, the flight of birds across the sky and the staccato sound of birdcalls against the landscape.

His father first brought him to Clare Island when he was in his teens. The reverse of this painting is liberally inscribed with words from the Death by Water section of T.S. Eliots The Waste Land. Two overlapping sets of writing in the artists hand suggest that he revisited, and perhaps revised, the painting, and that it had particular significance for him. It is entirely possible that he was commemorating the centenary of his paternal grandfathers death by drowning (he perished en route from the mainland to Clare Island in 1883). OMalley returned to the theme in a fine 1985 painted construction, Sea Dirge Full fathom five thy father lies /Of his bones are coral made. This time the quotation is from Shakespeares The Tempest. As it happens, Eliot plucked a quote (Those are pearls that were his eyes) from that same verse in another section of The Waste Land.

Aidan Dunne, February 2019

 

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