A leading artist in the history of Irish painting in the 20th century

Tony O'Malley was a prolific artist whose work and life are inextricably interconnected, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic

Art became for Tony O'Malley a grand alternative to the fate assigned to him by personal and historical circumstances. It was a way of escape from the stifling provincialism of the bachelor boarding-house lifestyle he lived in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.

Looking back once on his move to Cornwall, he recalled his feelings on having made the transition to a new life, to being a working artist with his own studio. He was almost bemused at his own good fortune. "It was," he said, "all I ever wanted."

There is no question but that Cornwall, where he lived for some 30 years from 1960, transformed his art as well as his life. At the same time, in Cornwall as in Ireland, he was an independent spirit.

Although he gravitated toward the Modernist fringe of Irish art in the 1950s, he was at heart a cautious, self-contained traditional artist who was slowly learning his craft through experience. The richly atmospheric representational paintings he made during this time, with the heavy, emphatic style of a moody Irish Van Gogh, give little hint of what was to come.

In Cornwall in the early 1960s, he found a colony of sympathetic artistic radicals who relished their position outside the mainstream of British art. In this benign though challenging creative climate, his own talent was allowed to flourish and he devised a personal style that combined elements of abstraction and representation.

While through most of the 1960s he still favoured the muted palette and dark tones which characterised his earlier Irish work, he was also making bold forays into a distinctly lighter palette and a very strong use of abstract pattern.

Both these elements, colour and pattern, led to an extraordinary artistic flowering in the 1970s and 1980s, not least in the brilliantly coloured Bahamian paintings that became a regular part of his output from 1974.

Just when you thought you knew Tony O'Malley he was apt to confound you, and the Bahamian paintings are a perfect example. Their advent coincided with Ireland's rediscovery of the emigré artist and they amazed Irish audiences with their soaring optimism, inventive flair and sheer generosity of vision.

While Tony O'Malley had matured and flourished as an artist in Cornwall, he never abandoned the sense of identity that bound him firmly to his native landscape in Co Kilkenny and on Clare Island.

Even at its most abstract, his work is acutely sensitive to the nuances of local atmosphere, and this is equally true for paintings made in Callan, Cornwall and the Bahamas.

Returning to Ireland, he was able to apply the daring painterly language he had perfected in Cornwall to familiar Irish terrain, considerably broadening out the pictorial possibilities and allowing for the creation of some great paintings.

He had a magpie eye for visual detail and even apparently abstract works contain clues to specific places. He was a prolific artist who lived to work and work and life are so inextricably interconnected that his art forms a cumulative visual diary. He was modest and non-materialistic as an artist and never thought strategically in terms of his own career.

Yet, working from a position of quiet independence, aesthetically and, for some 30 years, geographically, he succeeded in becoming one of the most respected and celebrated Irish painters of his time and a leading, indispensable presence in the history of Irish art in the 20th century.