IT IS hard to say why one can accept one modern, abstract artist, applaud his skills and empathise with his vision, yet find oneself utterly detesting the works of most of his contemporaries. Perhaps it is that one intuitively understands that even in the midst of abstraction one artist has vision and artistic purpose and another is merely miming on canvas, making merely empty gestures which conform with existing notions of what is artistically acceptable.
I will not return to the subject of the Irish Museum of Modern Art just yet, though I am not greatly astonished that Janine Antoni (she of the cubes and hair as a paintbrush) has won the Glen Dimplex prize. The reason she won was simply that l have not yet perfected my own medium - gravy as art - with particular emphasis on the uses of Bisto in edible portraiture.
However, one need not visit the great, ruined temple of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham to understand something of modern art; nor is it necessary to assume that all modern art is meretricious nonsense parading with the pretence of intellect. Fine modern art can be enjoyed in Scolar Press's wonderful celebration of the finest living Irish artist - Tony O'Malley.
Irish Turner
Tony O'Malley, now in his eighties, is both a refutation of the more conservative hostile response to abstract art - such as mine - and yet also a celebration and embodiment of the traditional and classical skills of the western European artistic tradition. It may sound ludicrous to call Tony O Malley an Irish Turner. It is not. Both had humble backgrounds and were precocious in their understanding of colour and composition.
The paintings of both share a wonderful sense of freedom, of vision, of energy, which call upon great skills, but remain beguilingly but misleadingly simple in execution. No doubt many of Turner's contemporaries looking at his London sunsets or his seascapes saw only gaudy colour and effect splashes from a lurid palate. And no doubt equally, somebody (like myself) who dislikes modernism would at first glance react adversely, even angrily, to much of Tony O'Malley's more abstract work - I open a page at random, and name, From a visit Kilcooley Abbey or Samanas Cay, Bahamas.
Needless to say, such responses would be superficial and unfair to Tony O'Malley - I think Turner is safe enough at this point - if only, because it is possible to see in the Scolar publication that he is enormously serious in his work. Page after luminous page reveals an artist of extraordinary talent and technical skill. His use of colour, like Turner's, is dazzling and original; and he is remarkably brave in his use of what might have been in other hands irritatingly bland pastels and wishy washy combinations.
Produce effects
At random, the pages containing Kilcooley and Samanas are before me now. I can make nothing of either, in form or shape of substance; but they both produce effects. The former, an abstract in greys and blacks, is redolent of a particularly oppressive dungeon, the latter is a dizzy splattering of sunshine colours, maybe sails, maybe glittering water reflections.
Nothing can induce me to like Kilcooley, Samana has - for a deep visual conservative like me - a baffling charm. I do not understand why I like it. I just do. In fact the more I look at it, the more I like it; and I suspect that it is because a natural artist like Tony O'Malley is able to communicate a seriousness of purpose, an innate sense of colour and composition, even within the colourful abstractions of a canvas which in itself makes little sense to me.
No doubt possibly I could get to like Kilcooley. I doubt it; I turn the page and I find The Bird Lake and Bird Lake II and Sea Requiem. These are both celebrations of modernism of the kind that some might say could be done by their four year old daughter. Show me the daughter. For these are celebrations of the artist's eye and the artist's festive and glorious imagination, visual feasts that revel in colour and novel and unexpected forms.
Turn over a few pages of this entrancing book and you are in more recognisable, figurative impressionistic territory: Summer Morning on the River Barrow was painted in 1991, when the artist was nearly 80. Modernists might dismiss it as being too derivative, too romantic. That is not the point. It is evidence of the extraordinary range of Tony O'Malley's work that he can move, apparently effortlessly, from explorations of semi pointillist colour to sombre experiments with light and shade.
Artistic soul
I will admit to a problem about Tony O'Malley, and it is this he could serve too easily as an example to younger artists who think that art is simply a question of expressing yourself with daubs and nailing a mop to, a fruit box (which is what the imaginatively named Fruit Box with a Mop consist of). And I am inclined to dislike some of his work, not merely for the inspiration he might give to younger, lazier, less inspired, less serious artists, but because they leave me unmoved.
But artists have to experiment; and no doubt the failure is mine rather than Tony O'Malley's. His truly extraordinary achievement remains with his abstract canvases, especially his recent ones, which seem to be wholly without figurative content, yet for even a conservative eye, are dazzling in effect.
Why? It perhaps goes back to the truth about Tony O'Malley. He is an artist. His artistry expresses itself even in forms which conservatives dislike. Open the book at random - pages 306-7, St Lucia and Night Music, and you have explosions of colour and shadow, sunshine and night; a joyous vigour and vibrancy that are beyond words to describe, but which most of all speak of wonderful artistic soul inside that four score and something body.
His journey has been as long as his life; he has experimented in many forms, and through that range has been extraordinarily successful. Tony O'Malley is alive and well and now living in Callan; and through this wonderful tribute, is available to us all.