Tony O'Malley (25 September 1913 – 20 January 2003) was an Irish artist. He was born in Callan, County Kilkenny, Ireland. O'Malley was a self-taught artist, having drawn and painted for pleasure from childhood. He worked as a bank officìal until contracting tuberculosis in the 1940s. He began painting in earnest while convalescing and, though he did at first return to bank work, he continued to paint and in 1951 he began exhibiting his work.In 1955 O'Malley holidayed in St Ives, Cornwall, then an important center of abstract art, and home to the artists Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, and Bryan Wynter, who he met and worked with. He returned again in 1957 and in 1958 retired from the bank to paint full-time. Prompted by a mixture of frustration at the indifference shown in Ireland to his work, an attraction to the sense of freedom he felt among the artists in Cornwall, and an engagement with the attempt to represent natural forms current in their abstraction, he settled in St Ives in 1960. While he was strongly influenced by the St Ives artistic community, his relationship was one of engagement rather than direct participation. His painting never completely assimilated the rigour and formality of the British abstract painters; it retained a muscular extravagance which is central to his artistic identity. Speaking to John O'Regan in an interview reproduced in Works 14: Tony O'Malley he explained: Wikipedia
Who is popular today?
