Jane O'Malley, wife of the late artist Tony O'Malley, talks to Art Critic Aidan Dunne about being keeper of the flame.
Since Tony O'Malley's death in January 2003, his widow, Jane O'Malley, has taken graciously to the role of keeper of the flame. She was already well used to guarding the much-loved artist from worldly intrusions but still, it has been a huge responsibility. For though Tony O'Malley turned to painting full-time relatively late in life, and although he was dogged by ill health, he was an assiduous and prolific worker whose life revolved around the making of art. He generated a tremendous body of work in paint, graphic media and sculpture, encompassing several distinct phases and locations, and his artistic legacy is formidable.
The retrospective of his paintings, which opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art this week, is clearly important, yet it is but one in a series of recent and forthcoming exhibitions exploring aspects of that legacy. His work has been strongly represented in shows drawn from the McClelland Collection at IMMA; Kilkenny's Butler Gallery has previously organised a popular touring show of his early paintings, and is currently hosting an exhibition to coincide with the publication of a book of drawings selected from his sketchbooks; the Graphic Studio Gallery is showing some of his graphic work and, during November, the Taylor Galleries will exhibit previously unseen paintings.
It's a lot to keep track of. But Jane O'Malley's devotion to Tony has been exceptional right from the start. The start was in 1969, in Cornwall, England. By then, he was an established presence in the artists' colony in St Ives. His bold decision to leave Ireland and settle in St Ives in 1958 had wrought an almost miraculous transformation in the circumstances of his life. Against a background of provincial Ireland he had been afflicted with debilitating lung disease, had led the peripatetic life of a bank clerk in gloomy lodgings, and had painted in semi-secrecy. St Ives was a liberation. Retired from the bank, for health reasons, on a modest pension, he was free to paint and live among artists. He loved it.
Jane, then Jane Harris, arrived at the St Ives School of Painting, an "old-fashioned" place, in September 1969. Born in Canada, she'd spent time in England, her father's birthplace, had travelled to Australia, Japan and across Siberia. Latterly she'd spent three years as an au pair in Switzerland with a French family, where she "managed not to learn French".
St Ives was a challenge. She found it "very cliquey" and just didn't feel at home. "I wasn't used to pub culture." She was thinking of heading back to Canada when she finally met Tony.
"Finally", because she had heard a great deal about him. "In fact I was fed up with people saying: Have you met Tony O'Malley yet? Everybody loved him."
She had seen one of his paintings in a gallery and thought it was wonderful. In the end they met by chance, when they were both visiting an elderly common acquaintance who had suffered a heart attack. One week later they again met, by chance, in the same way. This time, he invited her to supper. Supper was "a real bachelor's fry, smoke everywhere, everything overcooked. But it was as though we'd known each other forever".
Her plans changed. She did go Canada but now with the firm intention of returning to St Ives. He, meanwhile, went to Clare Island in a state of near-delirium, tramping the land and drawing feverishly.
"Tony's was the first real artist's studio I'd been in. My eye was not every educated then, but I took to the 1960s work immediately. I remember that I was aware of being in the presence of something quite powerful, something special."
The studio was one of a row of erstwhile sail lofts overlooking Porthmeor Beach. Painter and writer Patrick Heron was next door and, on the other side, Francis Bacon was a regular visitor. At one point Bacon abandoned the beginnings of what would have been a figure painting. A visiting Italian dealer approached Tony and suggested that he might fill in the background. "Tony was so incensed that he cut the painting in half."
For most of their time together Tony and Jane shared a studio, very amicably. Though first she had to prove herself. "The first holiday we went on together was to the Scilly Isles. We'd sit and work at either end of the kitchen table with the tubes of gouache in the middle. I just worked quietly away, and after that, once Tony was convinced that I wasn't going to be a disruptive influence, I was allowed into the studio." They worked together, she says, in complete silence.
Heron "was a big supporter of Tony. A lot of people couldn't understand how they were such close friends". For, although Tony was extremely popular in the artistic community, there was always a residual, subtle sense of not belonging. He was quietly aware of not being numbered among the St Ives artists in the context of certain exhibitions, though his work was certainly on a par with theirs. She reckons it was Heron who insured Tony was represented in a Tate Gallery survey show of the St Ives artists.
Her parents were understandably taken aback when she expressed her intention of marrying Tony. "After all he was 30 years older than me. So they were worried. Tony was worried himself."
She, though, wasn't. They married in 1973. "Tony spoke to my mother on our wedding day, but they never met. She died before that was possible."
It was after her mother's death that the family got together in the Bahamas, where her brother lived, and Tony met her father. In fact for many years her father's Christmas present to them was a pair of return tickets to the Bahamas, where the climate bolstered Tony's constitution and engendered a whole new body of vibrantly coloured paintings.
She first visited Ireland with Tony in 1974, when they stayed in the house where he was born, in Callan, Co Kilkenny. "We had a dream of getting a cottage, somewhere that would be our own base in Ireland but frankly, though we talked about it, we didn't have a bean to our name."
In 1977, with the help of a modest inheritance from her mother, they bought a labourer's cottage in Physicianstown. "We bought it sight-unseen, on the basis of a bad photograph taken on a wet November day. Tony had just had a heart attack and was only out of hospital. I remember he could hardly speak, he was lying in bed and he just croaked: 'Yes, we'll take it'."
From then they would come to Ireland during the summers and camp in the cottage, which was in a poor state of repair. Tony's fortunes were perceptibly changing, but money was still scarce. They took a loan out to restore and extend the cottage. They also built a a studio and, from 1990, were able to live there full-time. "Tony loved being back in Ireland. He was thrilled."
She too felt very much at home. "I know that people who move here from abroad can feel isolated. But I was always accepted here because of Tony."
During his final years, his health deteriorated drastically as he weathered a series of crises, but he never lost the will to work. Jane quietly adapted working facilities to suit his fading sight and mobility. First she fixed large-print labels to tubes of pigment. When that became difficult she imported handmade oil sticks from the US: "He loved those, they were very good to work with." Then she mixed bowls of colour, a brush in each bowl, ready to hand.
"And he would apply dots of pigment straight from the neck of the tube. He did that with Riddle of the Universe. The very last marks he made on canvas were on Christmas Day, 2002."
She works now in the studio adjacent to his working space. "It's hard without him, but it is like he is just there. I'm working with his work around me. I talk to him all the time. I visit his grave every day. He always said to me: Janey, if anything happens to me, promise me you'll carry on with your own work. I said I would, but I also promised him that I would look after his work. And I will."
Tony O'Malley, curated by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith and accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue (€29) is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham until Jan 1; tel: 01-6129948 or see www.modernart.ie
Tony O'Malley: The Visual Diaries, selected by Brian Lynch, Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny, until Dec 4; tel: 056-7761106