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Artist: Tony O'Malley HRHA (1913-2003) Title: Callan Painting (1980) Signature: signed with initials'O M' on the left, titled and dated 1980 verso with artist's archive no. R235 verso Medium: oil on board Size: 122.20 x 60.80cm (48.1 x 23.9in) Framed Size: 129.8 x 68.5cm (51.1 x 27in) Provenance: These Rooms, 27th October 2020 lot 79; Private Collection a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} A large oil on board, Callan Painting represents a work from what was perhaps Tony O'Malley's most productive period, when he was based at Porthmeor Studios in St. Ives. Inspired by the art, artists and landscape of Cornwall, but also fondly remembering the Irish countryside of his youth, he painted... Read more Tony O'Malley Lot 48 - 'Callan Painting (1980)' Estimate: €12,000 - €18,000 A large oil on board, Callan Painting represents a work from what was perhaps Tony O'Malley's most productive period, when he was based at Porthmeor Studios in St. Ives. Inspired by the art, artists and landscape of Cornwall, but also fondly remembering the Irish countryside of his youth, he painted several works named after the village in Kilkenny where he had been born and raised. Although an abstract painting, this work can also be read as a map, with flat areas of grey, brown and white divided into different fields by inscribed boundaries. Within these areas, O'Malley has made further incisions and pock-marks, suggesting ancient ringforts and burial sites beneath the present-day fields of Kilkenny. In its scratched and scraffitoed surface, and expressive use of colour, Callan Painting represents an artist's visual expression of an intense love of place. Although he became one of Ireland's best-known artists in the late twentieth century, O'Malley was largely self-taught. His initial career, working at the Munster and Leinster Bank (now part of AIB), was interrupted through illness, when tuberculosis led him to spend periods in hospital. However, interested in art from the outset, and even while working at a bank in Wexford, he would go on painting expeditions with a friend, Richard Kingston. O'Malley decided in 1959 to retire and become a fulltime painter, but was frustrated at what he felt was an atmosphere of polite disregard towards modern art in Ireland. In the early 1960s he visited St Ives several times, and as soon as he was retired, moved to Cornwall. In St. Ives, he embraced an abstraction based on natural forms, one that had inspired the progressive art community there during the war years. O'Malley worked within a milieu in which Ben Nicholson Barbara Hepworth Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon were well-established, and his success lay in his ability to absorb aesthetic strands of European and British art, whilst remaining faithful to his own inner vision-he liked to title his paintings 'inscapes'. In O'Malley's work, visual description is secondary to an attempt to capture the underlying experience of somewhere he loved, whether it be Callan or Clare Island in Ireland, St. Ives in Cornwall, or, later in his career, the Caribbean. In Cornwall, he met the painter Jane Harris and they married in 1974. Over the years that followed, they spent many winters working in the Bahamas, the effect of bright colours filtering through to his paintings. They also spent winters in the Canary Islands. Elected a saoi of Aosdána, from 1990 onwards Tony and Jane O'Malley lived in a cottage in his native village of Callan. Peter Murray, March 2023