Tony O'Malley HRHA (1913-2003) Yellow Pond (1995) Oil on ca...

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€20,000 - €30,000

Tony O'Malley HRHA (1913-2003) Yellow Pond (1995) Oil on canvas, 183 x 121cm (72 x 47½'') Signed with initials; inscribed, dated 1995 and with oeuvre number 3246 verso When he worked on canvas, rather than, as he did more commonly, on board, there is usually a comparative lightness to Tony O’Malley’s work. Not alone in terms of palette, though that is often the case, but also in the texture and weight of the image. With board, the artist often scores lines and marks into the surface, creating physical incisions and ridges. These markings ground the work, so to speak, and persist as features of the composition regardless of whatever over-painting might follow. Largely denied that option when painting on lighter, more flexible canvas, he is challenged to come up with solutions achieved purely though the application of pigment, something that was on the whole creatively stimulating, even liberating, for him. Broadly speaking, painting trips to the Isles of Scilly and then, more decisively, annual stays in the Bahamas for over a decade from the mid-1970s (thanks to the hospitality of a brother of Jane O’Malley, who was resident there), spurred a decisive shift in the painter’s palette and encouraged the use of canvas rather than heavier board. The vibrant light and colour of the Bahamas broadened his art in an enduring way, even when, later in life, he and Jane were settled by the King’s River in Callan. This wonderfully buoyant and light filled composition, with a flowing, centrifugal energy, characteristically blurs the line between water surface, depth and reflection. A radiant, high-keyed yellow dominates, punctuated by ochre notes and washes of paler tones and green, with rhythmic groups and darts of blues and pink. O’Malley’s landscapes are always, in a term borrowed from Gerald Manley Hopkins, Inscapes, if not necessarily in Hopkins’ strict sense of the term, reflections of his own individual sensibility closely attuned to the richness of the world around him. Born in Callan, O’Malley worked initially as a bank clerk while painting in his spare time. Convalescing from TB, he began to paint in earnest and moved to St Ives in Cornwall to pursue his artistic vocation around 1960. He married fellow painter Jane Harris in 1973 and their lives together revolved around their work from then on. His reputation grew from this time and was secured with a major touring retrospective in 1984, the first of many. His intensely lyrical, personal approach to landscape made him one of the most highly regarded Irish painters of the 20th century. His work is included in numerous public and private collections and some is permanently on view in a dedicated gallery in the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. Aidan Dunne, February 2025