Born: January 11th, 1944
Died: June 3rd, 2023
That Jane O’Malley (née Harris) came to settle in Ireland has everything to do with her marriage to the painter Tony O’Malley. They met in the artists’ colony of St Ives in Cornwall, in 1970. He had been there for the previous decade, she was a recent arrival, studying at the St Ives School of Painting. She was born in Montreal, the youngest of four children. Her parents, Grace Kinlock and Jordan Harris, were, respectively, of Scottish descent and British. Although keen on pursuing a creative vocation, she hated the year she spent at the university art school in Montreal. She and her brother Chris, restless and keen to see the world, set off travelling, spending time in Scandinavia, sharing a house in Sydney, visiting Japan and Russia.
En route home, both independently decided that their futures lay elsewhere. Staying with her aunt in Essex, Jane took on a job as an au pair in Switzerland, where she spent the next three years. It was her father, a chemist and a photographer, who told her about the St Ives school in a letter, saying she might like its freer, less orthodox academic regime. He was right. She was aware of Tony O’Malley as an established St Ives artist before she met him. Once they did meet, their relationship quickly blossomed, despite a significant age difference and his health problems – he was a survivor of TB, with heart and other issues.
Even before their marriage in 1973, their domestic and working lives became inextricably enmeshed and remained so until his death in 2003. She organised their lives around his wellbeing and around their daily work routine – their carefully arranged working tables and easels were a fixture in every place they occupied, however temporarily. Her innate, impeccable aesthetic sense informed the way she designed their living and working environments – at their home in Seal Cottage, in their spacious Porthmeor studio nearby and on their regular trips and sojourns abroad, trips always filled with painting and drawing.
These trips included visits to St Martin’s in the Scilly Isles and, for over a decade, annual six-week stays on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, where Jane’s sister and her husband were based. Later, Lanzarote became their annual winter destination. All these locations were climatically beneficial to Tony. They bought a cottage at Physicianstown, near Callan, Co Kilkenny, Tony’s birthplace, in 1977, eventually moving and settling there in 1990 after extending the dwelling and building a studio.
Each new interior was in itself a composition for Jane, an arrangement to be carefully considered, with flowers, plants and vessels as constant, essential components. She always constructed her surroundings meticulously, arranging and rearranging relatively few elements in endlessly inventive ways, thinking ahead to the drawings and paintings she would make. Some of her best paintings are of the land and sea framed by windows, of the wonderfully harmonious interiors she created and the luxurious garden she made at Physicianstown.
Both her drawings and paintings evidence a strong graphic instinct, a liking for clean, incisive lines and patterns, and a feeling for elegant form. Often, in her paintings and prints, her line cuts through amorphous expanses of rich, intense colour to great effect. She never lost her sense of wonder at the beauty of the everyday, and that comes across unfailingly.
Jane exhibited regularly with Taylor Galleries in Dublin, and her work is included in numerous public and private collections. In 2017, Anna O’Sullivan curated an outstanding retrospective survey of her graphic work, Black and White: Works on Paper 1971-2017, at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny.
Following Tony’s death, Jane donated his estate to the Butler Gallery (where examples of work by the couple are always on view) and, in 2010, working with the RHA, established the O’Malley Residency, an annual, year-long painting residency offering the use of a house and studio, in Tony’s original family home in Callan.
She is survived by her brother Chris, sister-in-law Rita and her extended family.