Tony O'Malley HRHA (1913-2003)
The Carp Pond, Winter and Sunken Black Pots (1993)
Oil on board, 91.5 x 122cm (36 x 48'')
Signed in Gaelic; signed again with initials, inscribed with titles...

Tony O'Malley HRHA (1913-2003)
The Carp Pond, Winter and Sunken Black Pots (1993)
Oil on board, 91.5 x 122cm (36 x 48'')
Signed in Gaelic; signed again with initials, inscribed with titles verso and dated 31/12/1993 (AR 2963)

Exhibited: 'Tony O'Malley Exhibition', The Taylor Galleries, November/December 2005, where purchased by current owner.

Literature: 'Tony O'Malley', 2005, full page illustration.

The titles of Tony OMalleys paintings could be either deeply poetic or bluntly descriptive as is the case with this one. Painted on New Years Eve in 1993, the pool is devoid of the fecundity that abounds in Life in the Pond II, in its late summer glory, featured on the previous page.

There is something truly heroic about all of OMalleys work, as indeed about his life. His appalling health situation was matched by his isolation as an artist in Ireland (self-taught, forced to earn a living as a bank official during the day and cut off from the supportive network of other artists until he finally made the move to Saint Ives in Cornwall) and to a lesser extent, his isolation as an Irishman outside the loop of the Irish art world in Cornwall. Yet his work reflects an inflexible commitment to continue making artwork against whatever obstacles presented, and to do that with vigour, grace and, frequently, humour.

Time plays an important part in his work either as a central aspect of his paintings of nature or as a link to history and heritage. His vision was part of that heroic, and limitless outlook. He embraced nature and history as two dimensions that put his own frail human existence into a bigger picture. For this reason, his famous Good Friday paintings, and his haunting pictures of November/All Souls Night and that celebration of death and the spirit are sombre but also life affirming in the unflinching manner in which he addresses them.

Carp pond, Winter, sunken black pots is sparse when compared to the 1996 painting on the previous page but even in the starkness of the winter pool, when the sunken pots, missing their summer vegetation, become visible and the overall tonality is austere and cool, the vivacity of those tiny little carp darting across the expanse of the water, suggest teeming life. Something that no amount of winter cold can subdue. It may be the final day of the old year, but the promise of summer is already present.

Jane OMalley, Tonys artist wife, recalls how she gave him a present of a carp for his birthday each year, and how they watched those little fish grow from babies bought for eleven pounds a time in the early 1990s, to magnificent specimens worth hundreds of pounds within a decade, before they succumbed to attack by mink. Described as, "the queen of rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish by Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler , (1653), the carp in this painting are young and full of life. As always, OMalley is preoccupied with the sense of movement and their magical streaks of colour at the expense of a more descriptive depiction.

Catherine Marshall

 

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