Painting, Titian is supposed to have remarked, is an old man's art. He was ideally qualified to offer his opinion. He was reputed to have lived to the age of 99: astounding for his time, and highly unlikely, but even more conservative estimates have him surviving until he was close to a still exceptional 90. Perhaps the secret of his longevity lay in his temperament. "This profession," he is also quoted as saying, "requires an unruffled temper". An unruffled temper is certainly an apt description of the imperturbable Tony O'Malley, now 85 and, as his paintings attest, a remarkably youthful 85.
A new exhibition of his work, opening at the Taylor Gallery next Thursday, shows him to be as productive and inventive as ever. The paintings in the show span the last four years, and they include some of the largest compositions he has made, as well as such staples as two Good Friday pictures - it has long been his practice to make paintings on certain key days of each year, notably Good Friday. Meanwhile, the Nordjylands Kunstmuseum at Aalborg in Denmark has just shown a retrospective devoted to his work from the 1940s to the 1960s (this exhibition ends tomorrow).
It was during these years that O'Malley, a late starter, began to paint and made his decisive move to settle in St Ives in Cornwall. That he became a painter at all is partly a matter of chance and partly a testament to his sheer, dogged determination. Born in Callan, Co Kilkenny, he began his working life as a bank clerk but, after he contracted TB and was consigned to the no-man's-land of sanatoria, took up paints and brushes as a way of passing the time. Even prior to that he had been seriously ill once before, and illness has intruded into his life on several occasions. "I knew I was dying a couple of times. But I never thought it would happen to me."
He has frequently described his experience of the stultifying, claustrophobic world of provincial bachelor life in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. Art became the means of his escape from this oppressive reality, but becoming an artist in the world he inhabited entailed a degree of determined self-invention that it is virtually impossible to imagine nowadays, when art is almost, if not quite, a viable career option. There was something clandestine, even furtive, about his pursuit of painting, although he was gradually "outed" as an artist when he began to exhibit with the Living Art and the Oireachtas. So his move to the more open environment of St Ives was essential to his development. He first visited St Ives on a painting holiday in 1955, and gravitated tentatively towards the idea of settling there after he finally retired from the bank on the basis of his poor health.
In 1960 he took the plunge. In all he spent 30 years based in Cornwall, and it is perhaps ironic that one of the finest Irish painters of his generation (and his century) - though his identity, personal and artistic, is very definitely grounded in his Irishness - had to travel abroad to flourish. In any case, St Ives was good to him, providing him with a beautiful physical environment and, probably more importantly, a community of artists. One of those artists, the Canadian-born Jane Harris, became his wife in 1973. Over the following years, he and Jane travelled to the Bahamas each winter to stay with her family. These stays in the brilliant Caribbean light opened up a new, immensely appealing aspect of his painting.
From the late 1970s, the couple began to spend time in Ireland every year and, in 1990, they moved to Physicianstown, near Callan, something that O'Malley had mixed feelings about: "It was a difficult thing to do, to come back to Callan after flying away from it like a bird." But they have settled in very well, and Jane has made a garden, with a pond and a dove-cote, that is a constant source of inspiration.
It is very much in evidence in his recent work, which is not to say that he makes straightforward representations of his surroundings. For the most part he doesn't, yet his paintings are invariably rooted in close observation of the world around him. He covets and hoards visual details, and his pictures are laced with naturalistic snippets, but he rarely stops at that. A glance around his show will reveal his penchant for finding and elaborating on pattern in nature, something that cannot be over-emphasised in his approach to picture-making.
HIS images are filled with sharp darting forms that recall visual - and sometimes auditory - sensation: bird beaks and claws, plumage and birdsong, the shadowy shapes of fish suspended beneath the surface, and their abrupt movements. Often, through his use of colour and tone, he seems to capture a precise place, time and mood, and then embellish this framework with sharp intimations of sounds and actions - or, indeed, their opposite, as when he occasionally specifies the silence of a place.
He is thoroughly adept at working with both extremely dark and extremely light palettes. A Silence, painted just last year, is a small painting which is atmospherically intense although it is a simple arrangement of dark green, black and dark grey. Equally dark and sonorous, Good Friday, also from 1998, suggests a wintry subterranean expanse, with fish and plant forms stirring into spring. By contrast, Summer with its expanse of vibrant green, is immeasurably more bright and airy.
Even before he returned to settle near Callan, O'Malley was interested in the old, ancestral places, including those on Clare Island, with which one side of his family is associated, and around Kilkenny. It is particularly gratifying, however, that his return to Ireland has led on to such a rich and thorough exploration of his own home ground, for he is a painter with an incomparable gift for capturing a sense of place.
Tony O'Malley, Paintings 1995- 1999 is at the Taylor Galleries from Thursday next until April 24th.