Adams Important Irish Art 30th September 2015 : You can Download a PDF Version from the Bottom Menu Down Arrow Icon

96 / 196

Oil on board, 61 x 122cm (24 x 48”)
Signed, inscribed with title and dated 1964. (Artist’s Reference R197)
Exhibited: “O’Malley: Work from the Sixties” Exhibition, The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny 1992, Catalogue No. 39, where purchased by present owner.
Literature: “O’Malley: Work from the Sixties”, Brian Fallon Essay, full page illustration.
This is one of an important series of works that O’Malley did in the winter after the death of his friend and mentor Peter Lanyon; there is a smaller variant of this
work in The Crawford Gallery in Cork.
O’Malley himself explained “It’s a symbol picture. The winter after Lanyon died there was a heavy snowfall. I saw this hawk hovering over a quarry at Newmill.” (1)
O’Malley had worked in St. Peter’s Loft when he first went to St. Ives where Lanyon ran a modern art school.
Brian Fallon wrote of this painting in the introduction essay to the Butler Gallery exhibition catalogue in 1992: “In fact one of his figurative masterpieces was
painted in this period, the picture commemorating his friend Peter Lanyon, who died following a glider crash in 1964. As the subtitle makes clear, it was suggest-
ed by the sight of a hawk circling over a quarry at Newmill, a place which I know well and which is within walking distance of Trevaylor. There is a variant of this
picture in The Crawford Gallery in Cork, equally powerful perhaps, though I prefer the present version. It has always tempted me to the dangerous edge of ‘liter-
ary’ interpretation; the quarry looms like a black hole or mouth of the underworld, to which the rapidly circling bird seems hypnotically drawn, and we remember
that Lanyon met his death as a result of his Icarus-like urge to fly. Even the hawk itself can be seen as a half-conscious symbol of freedom and creativity, with a
suggestion of hubris, and as a reminder of the fragility of human life and aspiration in a world ruled by brute chance”. (2)
The above note is very similar to what Fallon later wrote in “Tony O’Malley” by Scholar Press 1996 where he referred to the two works: “While these two paintings
rank easily among O’Malley’s masterpieces, formally they are entirely straightforward and if anything mark a reversal to his earlier, Expressionist manner “ (Page
108) .
In his review of the exhibition for the Sunday Tribune (14th June 1992), the art critic Aidan Dunne also singled out this work and wrote: “One of the best pieces in
the show commemorates his friend Peter Lanyon... The picture has an intense wintery quality. Its spare forms, jagged rhythms and the central, brooding pres-
ence of a windhover suspended over the gaping quarry pit combine to produce a potent but unforced symbolism typical of O’Malley at his best. It is also perfectly
illustrative of what he means by “People and Landscape”: not the mere depiction of figures in landscapes but a sense of personal involvement.”
(1) Quoted in the Sunday Tribune 14th June 1992
(2) “Tony O’Malley” by Brian Fallon Butler Gallery Catalogue 1992
€10,000 - 15,000