BREON O'CASEY:BREON O'CASEY, who has died aged 83, was a painter, engraver, weaver, jeweller and sculptor of distinction. He was associated with what is loosely described as the St Ives School, which flourished in the decades following the second World War.
The influence of Braque is evident in his early work, and Ben Nicholson also made an impression on him. His work reflects a deep feeling for nature. His friend and mentor, Denis Mitchell, said of his work, “Some of his most beautiful paintings, in muted colours, only reveal their great depth and lyrical qualities after a long time of intimate familiarity.”
Later in his career his palette brightened and became more colourful. This development has been ascribed to his visits to Ireland, particularly to a stay in Mayo in 1994, as a guest artist of the Ballinglen Foundation. The visit had other consequences. “To my surprise, I found that the paintings that came out of this process began to look more like landscapes than still-lifes, hopefully inspired, in part at least, by the varied landscape and weather of Mayo.”
He was born in London in 1928, one of three children of the playwright Seán O’Casey and his wife Eileen (née Reynolds). In 1937 the family moved to Totnes in Devon where he attended Dartington Hall, a school that placed physical activities and skills on a par with academic achievement. Art was his best subject, although he never took it in an exam.
On completing his national service, he enrolled at the Anglo-French Art Centre, a small school in St John’s Wood, London, strongly oriented towards the French school of painting. There, he recalled, “we learned from each other, and from endlessly parading around the London galleries, both private and municipal”.
The next 10 years were difficult, full of doubt and lethargy. In the late 1950s he watched a documentary about the primitive painter Alfred Wallis, who had lived at St Ives. Liking what he saw of the place, Breon O’Casey decided to move there and immediately felt at home. “They talked about the artists being attracted to St Ives because of the light,” he later wrote. “That’s all balls: it was the sense of camaraderie against an, at best, indifferent, and at worst, hostile, world that drew them.”
He worked on a part-time basis in the sculpture studio of Denis Mitchell, and later became an assistant to Barbara Hepworth. These were the years of his apprenticeship – self-expression was not yet on the agenda. He learned the virtue of patience and to accept the necessity of tedium in the creative process. Moreover, he learned how to combine the practical world of the market place with the ideal world of the artist. Sculptors, he reckoned, were far more practical people than painters, yet they retained their ideals.
He occasionally sold a painting, but mainly supported himself and his family through making and selling jewellery, and through working part-time as a telephonist. For many years he was known and highly regarded as a jeweller. He liked to work in silver and gold, and also made effective use of stones such as granite. He acknowledged the influence of Alexander Calder, whose work any aspiring jeweller had only to study “to be set on the right course for life”. In his forties he quit the telephone exchange to become self-employed. Jewellery paid the bills and enabled him to devote the bulk of his time to painting.
He took up weaving in the 1960s, inspired by a book on Navaho weavers. He made a loom out of an old bed and specialised in simply-designed rugs with a minimum of decoration. Proud of his craft, he preferred his rugs to be placed on the floor rather than be hung on a wall. Eventually, however, his legs gave out on him, and he had to abandon the loom.
An accomplished printmaker, he had tried his hand at sculpture but with little success until the Irish sculptor Conor Fallon introduced him to wax as a material. Finding it more sympathetic than clay or plaster, he began to make small wax figures, which he then had cast in bronze. Whereas his paintings were mainly abstract, his sculptures were almost all figurative.
In the late 1970s he moved to Paul, a village near Penzance, where he set up a studio-workshop. His work was shown in exhibitions around the world, and his first exhibition in Ireland was in the Little Theatre at Brown Thomas. Subsequent shows were held in the Taylor and Peppercanister galleries and at the RHA Gallagher Gallery.
His wife Dorothy Corscadden, daughters Duibhne and Oona and son Brendan survive him.
Breon O’Casey: born April 30th, 1928; died May 22nd, 2011