A folkish exterior concealing a deep culture

Tony O'Malley was, as a man, wholly unique, and the word "personality" seems poor and inadequate in reference to him. He appeared to draw all sorts and conditions of men - and women, too - towards him, including many who would never have gone near an art exhibition and probably thought that Jackson Pollock was an American folk singer. He was, in fact, the least "arty" of all the artists I have known.

This almost folkish exterior concealed a deep culture, a depth of reading and a remarkable range of interests which ranged from aeronautics (I remember him constructing an air balloon once to amuse my youngest brothers) to hurling. He had a strong interest in history and antiquities, nourished by his native region of Kilkenny - "Norman Ireland", he always called it - with its old abbeys and castles and stone monuments which helped to form his style.

His parentage gave him a footing in two very different aspects of Irish life ; his father came from the O'Malleys of Clare Island, while his mother belonged to the more petit-bourgeois, small-town world of Leinster. So there was always a strain of the wild westerner in him, co-existing with the man who grew up in a small town (Callan) in which he knew everybody, and each person had his or her preordained social place.

I met him first in October 1952, in my parents' house in Wexford, when I was still a teenager and he was a man of nearly 40. I felt an immediate rapport with him, and this lasted half a century. For years he had been a minor bank official who got on well with his colleagues but found much of the work antipathetic, especially when the urge to paint and draw became more and more imperious.

He had spent a long stint in a TB sanatorium and came out one lung short, as well as suffering intermittently from angina. He was a close and treasured friend of my parents, but even they did not expect him to live into old age.

Eventually he was invalided out of the bank and was able at last to paint full-time. Up to that he had been a "secret" artist, almost never showing his work to people around him and hiding most of it in boxes or suitcases under his bed. The Irish Exhibition of Living Art did show at least one drawing by him in the early 1950s, but he remained unknown to the Dublin art public. No gallery was interested in him, no critic took him up, the media were unaware of his existence. He had no outlets for his work, yet he continued to produce it with unfettered industry.

A turning point came when he went on a painting holiday to St Ives, in Cornwall, in the mid-1950s. He had blundered almost unwittingly into one of the nerve-centres of art in the British Isles, and the effect it had on him was immediate. He went back again in, I think, 1957 and when I met him about that time, it was plain that his whole terms of reference had altered.

Previously he had talked of Picasso, Braque, Klee, Vlaminck; now he spoke with admiration of a whole range of contemporary artists from Pollock to "this great Cornish landscape painter, Peter Lanyon".

In Easter 1960 I visited him in the company of his old friend Richard Kingston, the painter; he was living and working then in an isolated farmhouse near Hook Head. He had decided, he told us, to take the plunge and move to St Ives, possibly for good; and he seemed moody and fatalistic about it rather than buoyant or optimistic.

Apart from his health, he had suffered blows in the preceding few years; his much-loved brother, Mattie, had died, and a woman he was close to had told him that she could not tie herself for life to a penniless artist with one lung. So he went the following month, which was May, and Cornwall more or less became his base for 30 years.

These years were not always easy, but he reshaped himself as an artist in what had become the centre of abstract painting in Britain. In particular, his self-belief was hugely strengthened by the acceptance he encountered from fellow-artists who included Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, Nancy Wynne-Jones, Bryan Wynter, Alan Lowndes, Breon O'Casey etc.

Unlike some of these he lived and worked in St Ives itself, where his small-town gregariousness and ability to mix with people made him wholly at ease with his surroundings. (I visited him there two or three times and can bear witness eloquently to this.) Later he moved for a time to a large country house bought by Nancy Wynne-Jones a few miles outside Penzance, and which became a kind of artists' colony; but St Ives remained his lodestone.

Ill-health was never far away, and at one stage he was hospitalised for several months by a heart attack. His near-neighbour in a ward of Tehidy Hospital was his friend and fellow-artist, Bryan Wynter, now long dead, who told me once that patients and even staff used to gather together to hear Tony tell stories.

"He told hundreds of them," Wynter recalled, "yet I never heard him tell the same story or joke twice." Undoubtedly it was his marriage in 1973, to the Canadian artist Jane Harris, which prolonged his life. Without her vigilant care and total commitment, years of bachelor-cum-bohemian living would surely have worn him down. From then on, a new serenity seemed to enter his life.

His reputation was by now spreading back to Ireland, and a major retrospective was mounted by the two Arts Councils, North and South. This exhibition opened in Belfast and was seen in Dublin and Cork; for the Irish public, it proved an eye-opener.

Another landmark was the TV documentary made about him by Muiris MacConghail, while a core of well-wishers - among whom I can include myself - wrote or propagandised on his behalf. The Taylor Gallleries in Dublin began to exhibit his work regularly, paving the way for his eventual return to Callan, with his devoted wife, at the beginning of the 1990s.

Tony O'Malley had come home, and the rest is history - alas, past history now, in personal terms. But the work lives on, and already he has a firm place in the hierarchy of Ireland's artists of the last hundred years.

Brian Fallon is author of Tony O'Malley: Painter in Exile and former Chief Critic of The Irish Times