Tony O’Malley: An Irish Artist in Cornwall (2005)

Tony O’Malley (1913-2003) is one of Ireland’s foremost painters of the last 50 years. Born in Callan, County Kilkenny, he was a late starter and learned his art surreptitiously while working as a bank clerk all over Ireland for 25 years. In 1955 he visited St Ives in Cornwall on a painting holiday. He was astonished to find a thriving and diverse artistic community there, made up of some of the leading names in the history of British art including Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Bernard Leach and the poet W. S. Graham. O’Malley moved there in 1960 and stayed for 30 years. It was a Celtic country where he felt at home and was the perfect environment for his art to develop. He also met and married the Canadian painter Jane Harris.
This book chronicles those tremendously creative Cornish years with a record of the friendships he struck up and the places he worked, tracing how O’Malley’s art developed into his unique and distinctive style.Also included is a lengthy and entertaining account, by O’Malley himself, of his early years growing up in County Kilkenny.
The book has 56 illustrations (16 in colour), most of which have never been published before