John O'Leary, who died on November 17th, was highly regarded both as a painter and an art educator. The eldest of a family of 11 children, he was born in Cork in 1929 to Eleanor (nee O'Sullivan) and Frank O'Leary.
He studied at the Crawford School of Art, graduating in 1958. The Gibson Bequest Travel Scholarship enabled him to go to Paris for two years, to study at the Atelier Andre Lhote and the Academie Julien.
While in Paris, he befriended fellow Irish artist Patrick Collins, and he worked with the expatriate Russian painter and designer Leon Zack, whom he credited with influencing his ideas on painting.
His first solo exhibition, at the Dublin Painters' Gallery in 1961, was opened by Siobhan McKenna.
After he returned to Cork, he taught art at Cork County VEC until 1965, and then at the Crawford School. He was a founder member of the Cork Arts Society.
He married Grace Hogg (from Ballysadare) at Clogheen in Cork in 1965.
In 1974 they moved to Sligo when he was appointed head of Sligo RTC's art department, which he helped to establish.
Popular with both students and colleagues as an art educator, he held firmly to the view that drawing was the indispensable foundation of visual arts practice.
He was involved in the establishment of the Sligo Art Gallery, and was its Artistic Director for the last five years - a position he had, to some extent, previously fulfilled informally. His teaching career, his involvement with arts organisations and increasing ill-health combined to limit the time and energy he was able to devote to his own work.
But from the mid-1980s he returned to his own painting with renewed vigour and exhibited more regularly, latterly at the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin.
In 1991 the Sligo Art Gallery organised a touring exhibition of his work, Sligo - A Landscape of Memories.
Though, as this title suggests, landscape and its personal associations were the primary sources for his painting, he generally abstracted from the landscape to produce tonally subdued, richly atmospheric compositions with a tightly controlled palette.
His best work has a brooding, meditative quality and a sense of place. He is represented in the collections of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in Cork and Sligo's Niland Gallery. He is survived by his wife Grace and their children Orla, Caitriona, Maighread, Deirdre-Ann and Cormac, and by his 10 brothers and sisters.
John O'Leary: born 1929; died November, 1999