Tony O'Malley at the Douglas Hyde

An interview by Aidan Dunne

Aidan Dunne: You were born in County Kilkenny. How long did you live there?

Tony O'Malley: I was born in Callan. I left when I was about nineteen or twenty, to a job in the old Munster and Leinster Bank. I was sent over to Ennis in County Clare for five years. That was a long time before I started painting. I was with the bank for about fifteen years. This was interrupted by. a long period of illness: T.B. I was out ofaction on and off for about eight or nine years. It was while I was out with T.B. that I started to paint. I'd go back home between stages at the sanatorium, and I began to paint then. The first painting I made was in 1945. I didn't call it art. It was just something I did. It could as easily have been poetry. I felt that my total ignorance of painting was someehow an asset to me. I began, around 1950, to exhibit in the Oireachtas and the Living Art.

Were you friendly with other artists at the time?

The only other artist I knew well at the time was my friend Richard Kingston. I did know some painters in St Ives in Cornwall, and I took a trip over there, without any intention of leaving Ireland or anything. But I managed to get a studio there.

Who did you know in St Ives?

Oh, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Brian Winter, Barbara Hepworth and so on. I was generally senior to them in age. Anyway I settled into painting there. I'd do a lot of work at home on paper and bring it back to St Ives to work it into paintings.

Do you still follow that pattern?

Yes. I'm doing a lot of drawings there at the moment for later work. Since '75 we've had a house in .Callan where we generally spend the summer. It's not a spectacular landscape, but because it's IXlY native ground I find it very fruitful. 11 can find things I knew there as a boy, which have a personal meaning for me. I'm a believer in that. I'm not a painter of foreign landscape, because I can't look at it just objectively, I have to get underneath the skin of it.

You've also been spending some time in the Bahamas eaen winter?

Yes. We go there to Jane's family, on Paradise Island. I paint there out of doors. All the big canvases here were done that way. And, in fact, a lot of my early work was done outdoors. The Bahamas are a strange place for a painnter. The people are interesting, they're musical, but I'm a landscape painter and I'm not interested in the landscape there for its own sake, but the light. An obbject becomes a luminous thing. No matter how bright you paint it looks dull by comparison with the reality.

It's easy to distinguish your Irish work from the Bahamian work.

It is, yes. A painting that comes out of Ireland is more subjective. I get a greater feeling of reality from it. Here, even commonplace things that are neglected by most people are important to me. When I draw or paint here there's someething added to it.

Which location do you prefer, which work?

I think the dark ones have always taken me over. The bright ones I enjoy doing, the experience of it, but the dark ones are more obsessive. Like whittling down a lot of words into a sparse, narrow poem. That interests me: the intensity. I'm not really a spontaneous painter. When I began, years ago, I was able to sit down and splash out, but I distrust that kind of approach. I like a more dissciplined kind of painting.

Are you a slow worker?

Well it takes me a long time to do a painting because I usually carry on about five or six at the one time. I leave a painting to one side when I feel I can't go any further with it. Technically, it needs something I can't specify and I don't want to impose on it. I'm the servant of the painting. It's a form of self-discovery. I get pleasure from the achievement of a painting but not from the actual struggle, which seems to dissappear as soon as it's resolved;

I'm a stumbling kind of worker, really. Jane works with me. We have a big studio, about sixty feet long. I've never had a facility for painting, for every one I do there's usually a heap of drawings around it, Objective drawings: stilllifes, self portraits - there are bits of self portraits in many of the paintings. But, I'm in my late sixties and painting is still a mystery to me.

How long would you spend on an indiviidual work, from start to finish?

About six months. I don't question the process, I work by instinct. I'm an expressionist, while I feel the interrnational style is too intellectual. I've always liked Van Gogh. I felt that was the spirit. My own views were borne out in St Ives my men like Bernard Leach, who had a Japanese approach to his own work. I met Japanese friends of his who bought my paintings because they felt that they fitted in with their ideas. The paintings as event, an inward thing. Another person who was important for me was Padraig Fallon, who lived in

Cornwall for a while. He was a poet who never professed to know anything about painting, but he knew you were doing something that was equivalent to what he was doing in poetry. He was a great help to me.

Knowing people like Lanyon in St Ives gave me the feeling that I could do anything.

There's a good sense of community there?

There is. With quite a lot of artists living there, with their families, there's a general acceptance of painting, sculppture and poetry, without what you might call competitiveness. It's good that way. As a painter, you feel you belong to a family. No jealousy, each person accepted in their own right.

Do you have a studio in Callan?

The house is' our studio, we live and work there. I've never been interested in houses as such. I suppose because I spent so much time in digs early on. Ennis, Mountrath, Kenmare, Dublin, all over the place, I lived out of a suitcase. In the late forties and early fifties, if you said to the landlady that you were painting in your bedroom, she'd throw you out, When I was in Enniscorthy, I kept all my painting materials in a trunk. The lid was the easel. There was a lingerring smell of turps of course, but I'd pack everything away and shove it under the bed. That was before I got a flat and was able to make a mess.

Do you find a readier acceptance of the kind of expressionist painting you do now than ten years ago?

Yes. There are cycles in painting. There will always be new waves, but more waves than tidemarks. The water falls back and nothing is left. Younger painnters will always be interested in technoological innovation. I think it's quite valid. We are moving into another time, Perhaps painting will soon be regarded as a rare kind of bird. But then, many people said easel painting was finished. I never had an easel, myself.

My view of painting is traditional. It's always hard to achieve an image. There is a reality underlying appearances. I must find it and confront it. In that sense, I, suppose painting is about the metamorphosis of things well known, And it's a kind of dialogue with a bit of board or canvas, and when it speaks back to me it works. When that happens I've gotten something out of it.

A major retrospective of the work of Tony O'Malley is showing at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity College, Dublin, from Monday July 30th to August 25th. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive cataalogue, written by Brian Fallon, art critic of the Irish Times, and containning 16 colour plates. It provides an exxcellent insight not only into 0 'Malley's work but also Irish and Cornish art from the post-war years on. It costs £5.00.