Reviewed:

An Irish Vision: Works by Tony O'Malley, Crawfrod Municipal Art Gallery, Cork (to Sept 30th; 0214315294)

Tony O'Malley: Selected Works, Fenton Gallery, Cork (to Sept 30th; 021-273377)

The small retrospective devoted to the work of Tony O'Malley at the Crawford Gallery is titled An Irish Vision, which seems entirely accurate and apposite. His paintings have earned him a place as one of the foremost, and best liked, Irish artists of the 20th century.

Yet it is ironic that, in order to make a body of work that has come to be seen as quintessentially Irish, he had to get out of Ireland. And, as he has remarked, when he left the country he found he'd brought it along with him. So it's the familiar story of Irish genius, then? Yes and no.

Since 1990, O'Malley and his wife Jane, herself a painter, have lived in rural Physicianstown, close to Callan, his home town in Co Kilkenny. He spent the previous 30 years in St Ives in Cornwall, where he and Jane met in 1970. By the time he became a full-time artist, after being retired from his job as a bank clerk on grounds of ill health - he had TB - he was already in his mid-40s, when most people, as he points out, have settled down. In the late 1950s, in poor health, depressed by his circumstances and by deaths in the family, and sceptical about his artistic prospects in Ireland, it can hardly have seemed that he was about to start all over again.

In St Ives he retained the essentials of his painterly character, but he also became a different kind of artist. He had served a long, rigorous apprenticeship as an artist in provincial Ireland, painting in digs after finishing the day job. This apprenticeship culminated in atmospheric descriptions of places and people, rendered in a robust, representational style, a kind of dark, moody realism.

Much of this work holds up very well, and a few years ago an exhibition featuring it, organised by Kilkenny's Butler Gallery, was something of a revelation. St Ives, still a significant artistic centre, opened him up to abstraction, but an abstraction always rooted in the world around him.

O'Malley soaks up the atmosphere of a place in odd, detailed, unpredictable ways, homing in on sounds, lines and patterns that become elements of a personal pictorial vocabulary. He has said that painting is for him quite like writing.

He carries not only Ireland, but all the places he has been, around with him. His father came from Clare Island, and that too numbers among his store of mental landscapes, acquired from childhood visits and from an extraordinary, feverish drawing binge during a rain-sodden stay there in 1970, when he was racked with pain from a gangrenous broken toe. Such internalised experiences of place form the substance of what he terms his "inscapes", because "landscape" isn't quite right.

Never ambitious or vainglorious, he is introspective and at home in his work. He never thought in terms of a career, just followed his instinct.

O'Malley has a pretty accurate sense of what his work is about. "I was never a social or political artist stating the plight of humans, although I am aware of it," he said in an interview with John O'Regan. Speaking of his admiration for Van Gogh, Cezanne and other French artists of their time, he notes that "the central reality about them is spirit - they suggest freedom and a sense of release." That is exactly what his own work encapsulates, and what it has been for him.

Art became literally a way of life, an alternative life. Art in the sense of what Gerhard Richter has termed "the daily practice of painting", with its overtones almost of duty and ritual. So that the work has quite accurately been termed a visual diary, an account of his life that runs seamlessly from one work to the next, from sketchbook to driftwood sculpture to panel painting, giving this sense that O'Malley works compulsively, obsessively.

The practice of art dictated the shape of his life just as the bank had dictated his frequent moves around the country in his earlier days. It is apparent that, looking back at the pattern of his working, there is a succession of moves towards greater levels of freedom.

From provincial Ireland to St Ives, from there to St Martins, the quite unexpected transposition to the brilliant light and colour of the Bahamas, to a rediscovered, perhaps transformed Ireland and, another surprise, the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote. Each location gained by these physical moves becomes, in the work, a space of possibility, with a new range of colours, forms, motifs. He has always been open to the possibilities of each new place, not only making it his own but responding enthusiastically to its difference.

Between the Crawford show and its timely companion exhibition of O'Malley's work at the Fenton Gallery nearby, virtually all phases and aspects of his output to date are represented. If the Crawford reprises the public and relatively familiar account of the painter - it is drawn from the show mounted in the Phillips Collection in Washington earlier this year - the Fenton is a more personal and intimate account.

A beautiful selection, it is subtly chosen to make unforced connections over time and place. Mars Black and German Silver from 1998 chimes perfectly with Snow Field Remaining from 1964. Siena, painted this year, reflects 1978's Studio. And the gallery's white, airy space could have been designed to show off O'Malley's work to best advantage. He uses a lot of black, and is on record as saying he loves black as a colour, and doesn't see it as having negative connotations. Looking at some of his darker compositions, bathed in soft generous light as they are here, you can see exactly what he means.