TONY O'MALLEY: Tony O'Malley, who has died aged 89, was among the most important and innovative Irish artists of the 20th century. He overcame chronic ill-health and isolation to become, in the words of the critic Brian Fallon, "one of the real originals of his time".
A self-taught artist, his early work was largely figurative and close to expressionism. He later discovered abstraction. "My introspective nature led to a rejection of imagery. I arrived at the inner world from outside. I didn't want to abandon the outer world."
Later still, his work reflected the brilliant light and vivid colours of the Caribbean, prompting comparisons with American abstract expressionism. But Tony O'Malley was possessed of a unique vision that owed little to any school or group.
He was born on September 23rd, 1913, one of the four children of Patrick and Margaret O'Malley (née Ryan) of Callan, Co Kilkenny. His mother ran a small shop, and his father was a salesman for Singer sewing machines. He began drawing at an early age.
Having completed his education at the Christian Brothers' school in Callan, he began working in 1933 for the Munster and Leinster Bank. Ennis, Co Clare, was the first of the many provincial towns that he worked in. On the outbreak of the second World War he enlisted in the Army. Stationed in Portobello Barracks, Dublin, in spartan conditions, he became seriously ill and was found to be suffering from pleurisy and pneumonia. Following treatment he was discharged from the Army on the grounds of ill-health.
He resumed working at the bank, but was hospitalised again in 1945 when tuberculosis was diagnosed. He underwent a lung operation at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, and while convalescing in Callan he completed his first oil painting. In the late 1940s he required further surgery, after which he spent time in TB sanatoriums where he immersed himself in drawing and painting.
Returning to the bank, he continued to develop his skills, working alone in lodging-house bedrooms and storing his work in a suitcase. Art was regarded as a slightly suspect activity for a bank clerk. "That part of your life you kept secret, kept it hidden from them. 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 was a general feeling that art or painting didn't matter."
Undaunted, however, he persevered. He got to know the artist Richard Kingston and had work accepted by the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and by the annual Oireachtas art exhibition. Encouragement came from the poet Padraic Fallon and the painter Father Jack Hanlon.
But there was little by way of recognition. And provincial Ireland in the 1950s was oppressive. "It was a 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 shouted down, and everything was potential heresy."
In 1955 he went on a painting holiday to St Ives in Cornwall, then a centre of artistic modernity. The experience was liberating. "I liked the kind of psychological freedom of Cornwall, where painters were accepted - many different kinds of course, all kinds; but painting itself was accepted as a human activity, with many different facets."
He made friends in Cornwall, among them Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and Bryan Winter, and returned for another holiday in 1957. The following year ill-health caused him to retire from the bank.
The death shortly afterwards of his brother Matty, and his rejection by a woman he loved, precipitated a profound depression. He stopped painting. Eventually he decided that his only remedy was to move permanently to St Ives. His decision was to be the making of him as an artist.
However, in 1961, a year after he moved, he suffered a severe heart attack. Following his recuperation, he went to live near Penzance. By 1969 he was back in St Ives, occupying a studio overlooking Porthmeor Beach. In 1970 he spent a month drawing on Clare Island, his father's birthplace. The resultant drawings were remarkable.
In 1970 also he met Jane Harris, a Canadian artist. They married in 1973. In subsequent years the couple travelled to the Bahamas each winter to stay with Jane's family. Painting in the open air under clear skies, Tony O'Malley's work took on a new and sensuous quality.
Two major exhibitions, in 1975 and 1979, helped to establish his reputation as an artist of stature. In the catalogue for the 1975 exhibition, Patrick Heron wrote: "[Tony O'Malley] looks at objects - of any or every description; he looks at light; he cannot help all the time consciously absorbing the actual visual nature of whatever reality or scene or environment he finds himself in at any given moment . . . His visual curiosity is virtually without limitation."
An Arts Council travelling exhibition of his work opened in Kilkenny in 1981. That year also he was awarded the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal in the Oireachtas exhibition, and he was elected a member of Aosdána. The RTÉ television documentary, Places Apart, acknowledged his place at the forefront of Irish art. He became a regular exhibitor at the Taylor Galleries and in 1990 he and his wife established a home and studio in Physicianstown, near Callan, where he lived and worked until his death. He received an Irish American Cultural Institute Award in 1989.
In 1993 he was elected a Saoi of Aosdána and in 1994 an honorary degree was conferred on him by Trinity College Dublin. He received the IMMA/Glen Dimplex Award for sustained contribution to the visual arts in 1999 and the following year he was granted the honour that he most cherished - the freedom of Kilkenny.
His wife Jane survives him.
Tony O'Malley: born, September 23rd, 1913; died, January 20th, 2003