CORNWALL -- Breon O'Casey, artist, born 30 April 1928; died 22 May 2011
Breon O'Casey, who has died aged 83, was one of the last survivors of two great traditions. As an artist, he was an important figure in the St Ives school, whose leading lights included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach. O'Casey's versatility as a jeweller, weaver, etcher, printmaker, engraver, painter and sculptor owed much to working among such talents.
But there was another dimension to the artist, who, as the sole surviving son of the Irish dramatist Seán O'Casey, provided a link to the Celtic literary revival. Born out of a movement that largely lacked a visual aspect, O'Casey filled a familial gap, becoming successful in a wide range of media that eschewed the written word.
This diversity was evident on a visit to his home, a converted stone farmhouse in Cornwall. O'Casey, a quiet man with a warm sense of humour, would open one door to reveal a giant printing press. Another room would be an emporium of beads, silver and stone, the raw materials of a jeweller's paradise. On the floors lay his woven rugs, inspired by the work of the Navajo people. He had made the hearth and the mantelpiece in the sitting room. After a studio full of canvases came a casting in bronze.
This sophistication resided in an artist who was both poetic and intent on discovering simplicity. Asked about the objects that interested him, he would respond that they were "not the wood, not the tree, but the leaf; not the distant view, but the hedge; not the mountain, but the stone". The patient, hopeful manner in which he went about his work, returning again and again to the same theme, building up the earthy textures of his paintings, he likened to the ways of a fisherman. "To paint," he said, "is to wait and watch, to try to listen to the picture, to chance a stroke, to hope for the best."
He was at times overshadowed by St Ives contemporaries, perhaps because his willingness to both draw on and acknowledge myriad influences may have slowed the emergence of a distinctive style. His repeated references in painting and sculpture to birds paid homage to the work of Georges Braque. He also saw himself as a "traditional innovator", rooted in the past, fascinated by ancient and non-western art. These influences can be seen in the primitive style of some of his sculpted figures. The Celtic mood of Cornwall and the distilled patterns of nature inspired his abstracted landscapes.
Although raised in a literary family, O'Casey was marked out for the visual arts from an early age. Seán O'Casey himself had so wanted to be a painter – an ambition frustrated by poor eyesight and early poverty – that in his later years he dressed the part, in coloured caps, cream jerseys and a deep-red dressing gown. "It was like sharing a house with Matisse," recalled his son.
Their home in Devon was filled with paintings, and Breon, on George Bernard Shaw's advice, was educated at the progressive Dartington Hall school, where there were paintings by Christopher Wood and Nicholson on the walls and a Henry Moore reclining figure in the gardens. He made his first jewellery in a metalwork room run by Naum Slutzky, a refugee from the Weimar Bauhaus.
During national service in 1946 with the Royal Artillery, his craving to be an artist persisted. The pin-up he put on his locker door was a Modigliani nude. "Bloody hell, O'Casey," declared his sergeant major. "What is this?"
Two years at the Anglo-French art centre in St John's Wood, north London, followed, where there was a heavy emphasis on Matisse, Braque, Miró, Giacometti, Utrillo, Renoir and Léger. But O'Casey spent much of the 1950s in comparative isolation with his parents in Torquay, painting and organising exhibitions of avant-garde artists. The decade, which he remembered as a dark time, "full of doubt and lethargy", was scarred by the death of his younger brother, Niall, from leukaemia.
It was his move to St Ives in 1959, after he saw a film about the painter Alfred Wallis, who lived in the town, that finally led O'Casey to kindred spirits. He found work as an assistant, first with the sculptor Denis Mitchell and then with Hepworth. The grande dame of British sculpture was a tough employer and money was so short for his new wife, Doreen, and their children that O'Casey worked part-time at the local telephone exchange as well. He later recalled being asked to smash Hepworth's unwanted plaster sculptures with a sledgehammer. "Very satisfying," he recalled.
A black-and-white photograph of O'Casey with Doreen and their three small children from the 1960s seems to sum up this hopeful period. There is a studio with a large window, looking out on a clear sky, with a single wave breaking on to Porthmeor beach. That image, of the simple bands of colour of sky, sand and sea, is echoed in his first abstract paintings, and the photograph seems to capture the era when he came to terms with visual expanse and felt at home as an artist.
But O'Casey was also one for "silent companionship" and, as St Ives grew busier, he decamped in 1975 to the village of Paul, near Newlyn, on the opposite side of the Penwith peninsula. There he carried on making jewellery, but gradually, as times improved, shifted into sculpting in wax in the 1990s and works on paper. Towards the end of his career, he re-engaged with Ireland, which his father had left before he was born. To O'Casey, it was a more liberal, more European country than the Ireland of the 1920s, less tainted by the commercialism of art in Britain of the 1990s. He even spent time painting abstract landscapes in his mother's native Mayo, but opted eventually to remain in Cornwall.
There, despite suffering from muscular dystrophy, he worked every day, giving himself a present of "no more jewellery" on his 70th birthday. Painting – using simple geometric shapes, often arranged in rows of three, a number he found intriguing and magical, a shorthand for infinity – took up more and more of his time.
He liked to think of himself moving like an Indian sadhu or ascetic beyond his youth and into a busy middle age. "Then," he would say, "you become a philosopher. Finally, at the end, you give up everything and wander off into the distance with just a begging bowl."
He is survived by Doreen, their daughters, Duibhne and Oona, and a son, Brendan; and five grandchildren.
The Guardian, Tuesday 31 May 2011
http://www.cornwall-opc.org/Resc/cemeteries.php
Breon O'Casey, who has died aged 83, was one of the last survivors of two great traditions. As an artist, he was an important figure in the St Ives school, whose leading lights included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach. O'Casey's versatility as a jeweller, weaver, etcher, printmaker, engraver, painter and sculptor owed much to working among such talents.
But there was another dimension to the artist, who, as the sole surviving son of the Irish dramatist Seán O'Casey, provided a link to the Celtic literary revival. Born out of a movement that largely lacked a visual aspect, O'Casey filled a familial gap, becoming successful in a wide range of media that eschewed the written word.
This diversity was evident on a visit to his home, a converted stone farmhouse in Cornwall. O'Casey, a quiet man with a warm sense of humour, would open one door to reveal a giant printing press. Another room would be an emporium of beads, silver and stone, the raw materials of a jeweller's paradise. On the floors lay his woven rugs, inspired by the work of the Navajo people. He had made the hearth and the mantelpiece in the sitting room. After a studio full of canvases came a casting in bronze.
This sophistication resided in an artist who was both poetic and intent on discovering simplicity. Asked about the objects that interested him, he would respond that they were "not the wood, not the tree, but the leaf; not the distant view, but the hedge; not the mountain, but the stone". The patient, hopeful manner in which he went about his work, returning again and again to the same theme, building up the earthy textures of his paintings, he likened to the ways of a fisherman. "To paint," he said, "is to wait and watch, to try to listen to the picture, to chance a stroke, to hope for the best."
He was at times overshadowed by St Ives contemporaries, perhaps because his willingness to both draw on and acknowledge myriad influences may have slowed the emergence of a distinctive style. His repeated references in painting and sculpture to birds paid homage to the work of Georges Braque. He also saw himself as a "traditional innovator", rooted in the past, fascinated by ancient and non-western art. These influences can be seen in the primitive style of some of his sculpted figures. The Celtic mood of Cornwall and the distilled patterns of nature inspired his abstracted landscapes.
Although raised in a literary family, O'Casey was marked out for the visual arts from an early age. Seán O'Casey himself had so wanted to be a painter – an ambition frustrated by poor eyesight and early poverty – that in his later years he dressed the part, in coloured caps, cream jerseys and a deep-red dressing gown. "It was like sharing a house with Matisse," recalled his son.
Their home in Devon was filled with paintings, and Breon, on George Bernard Shaw's advice, was educated at the progressive Dartington Hall school, where there were paintings by Christopher Wood and Nicholson on the walls and a Henry Moore reclining figure in the gardens. He made his first jewellery in a metalwork room run by Naum Slutzky, a refugee from the Weimar Bauhaus.
During national service in 1946 with the Royal Artillery, his craving to be an artist persisted. The pin-up he put on his locker door was a Modigliani nude. "Bloody hell, O'Casey," declared his sergeant major. "What is this?"
Two years at the Anglo-French art centre in St John's Wood, north London, followed, where there was a heavy emphasis on Matisse, Braque, Miró, Giacometti, Utrillo, Renoir and Léger. But O'Casey spent much of the 1950s in comparative isolation with his parents in Torquay, painting and organising exhibitions of avant-garde artists. The decade, which he remembered as a dark time, "full of doubt and lethargy", was scarred by the death of his younger brother, Niall, from leukaemia.
It was his move to St Ives in 1959, after he saw a film about the painter Alfred Wallis, who lived in the town, that finally led O'Casey to kindred spirits. He found work as an assistant, first with the sculptor Denis Mitchell and then with Hepworth. The grande dame of British sculpture was a tough employer and money was so short for his new wife, Doreen, and their children that O'Casey worked part-time at the local telephone exchange as well. He later recalled being asked to smash Hepworth's unwanted plaster sculptures with a sledgehammer. "Very satisfying," he recalled.
A black-and-white photograph of O'Casey with Doreen and their three small children from the 1960s seems to sum up this hopeful period. There is a studio with a large window, looking out on a clear sky, with a single wave breaking on to Porthmeor beach. That image, of the simple bands of colour of sky, sand and sea, is echoed in his first abstract paintings, and the photograph seems to capture the era when he came to terms with visual expanse and felt at home as an artist.
But O'Casey was also one for "silent companionship" and, as St Ives grew busier, he decamped in 1975 to the village of Paul, near Newlyn, on the opposite side of the Penwith peninsula. There he carried on making jewellery, but gradually, as times improved, shifted into sculpting in wax in the 1990s and works on paper. Towards the end of his career, he re-engaged with Ireland, which his father had left before he was born. To O'Casey, it was a more liberal, more European country than the Ireland of the 1920s, less tainted by the commercialism of art in Britain of the 1990s. He even spent time painting abstract landscapes in his mother's native Mayo, but opted eventually to remain in Cornwall.
There, despite suffering from muscular dystrophy, he worked every day, giving himself a present of "no more jewellery" on his 70th birthday. Painting – using simple geometric shapes, often arranged in rows of three, a number he found intriguing and magical, a shorthand for infinity – took up more and more of his time.
He liked to think of himself moving like an Indian sadhu or ascetic beyond his youth and into a busy middle age. "Then," he would say, "you become a philosopher. Finally, at the end, you give up everything and wander off into the distance with just a begging bowl."
He is survived by Doreen, their daughters, Duibhne and Oona, and a son, Brendan; and five grandchildren.
The Guardian, Tuesday 31 May 2011
http://www.cornwall-opc.org/Resc/cemeteries.php
CORNWALL -- Breon O'Casey, artist, born 30 April 1928; died 22 May 2011
Breon O'Casey, who has died aged 83, was one of the last survivors of two great traditions. As an artist, he was an important figure in the St Ives school, whose leading lights included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach. O'Casey's versatility as a jeweller, weaver, etcher, printmaker, engraver, painter and sculptor owed much to working among such talents.
But there was another dimension to the artist, who, as the sole surviving son of the Irish dramatist Seán O'Casey, provided a link to the Celtic literary revival. Born out of a movement that largely lacked a visual aspect, O'Casey filled a familial gap, becoming successful in a wide range of media that eschewed the written word.
This diversity was evident on a visit to his home, a converted stone farmhouse in Cornwall. O'Casey, a quiet man with a warm sense of humour, would open one door to reveal a giant printing press. Another room would be an emporium of beads, silver and stone, the raw materials of a jeweller's paradise. On the floors lay his woven rugs, inspired by the work of the Navajo people. He had made the hearth and the mantelpiece in the sitting room. After a studio full of canvases came a casting in bronze.
This sophistication resided in an artist who was both poetic and intent on discovering simplicity. Asked about the objects that interested him, he would respond that they were "not the wood, not the tree, but the leaf; not the distant view, but the hedge; not the mountain, but the stone". The patient, hopeful manner in which he went about his work, returning again and again to the same theme, building up the earthy textures of his paintings, he likened to the ways of a fisherman. "To paint," he said, "is to wait and watch, to try to listen to the picture, to chance a stroke, to hope for the best."
He was at times overshadowed by St Ives contemporaries, perhaps because his willingness to both draw on and acknowledge myriad influences may have slowed the emergence of a distinctive style. His repeated references in painting and sculpture to birds paid homage to the work of Georges Braque. He also saw himself as a "traditional innovator", rooted in the past, fascinated by ancient and non-western art. These influences can be seen in the primitive style of some of his sculpted figures. The Celtic mood of Cornwall and the distilled patterns of nature inspired his abstracted landscapes.
Although raised in a literary family, O'Casey was marked out for the visual arts from an early age. Seán O'Casey himself had so wanted to be a painter – an ambition frustrated by poor eyesight and early poverty – that in his later years he dressed the part, in coloured caps, cream jerseys and a deep-red dressing gown. "It was like sharing a house with Matisse," recalled his son.
Their home in Devon was filled with paintings, and Breon, on George Bernard Shaw's advice, was educated at the progressive Dartington Hall school, where there were paintings by Christopher Wood and Nicholson on the walls and a Henry Moore reclining figure in the gardens. He made his first jewellery in a metalwork room run by Naum Slutzky, a refugee from the Weimar Bauhaus.
During national service in 1946 with the Royal Artillery, his craving to be an artist persisted. The pin-up he put on his locker door was a Modigliani nude. "Bloody hell, O'Casey," declared his sergeant major. "What is this?"
Two years at the Anglo-French art centre in St John's Wood, north London, followed, where there was a heavy emphasis on Matisse, Braque, Miró, Giacometti, Utrillo, Renoir and Léger. But O'Casey spent much of the 1950s in comparative isolation with his parents in Torquay, painting and organising exhibitions of avant-garde artists. The decade, which he remembered as a dark time, "full of doubt and lethargy", was scarred by the death of his younger brother, Niall, from leukaemia.
It was his move to St Ives in 1959, after he saw a film about the painter Alfred Wallis, who lived in the town, that finally led O'Casey to kindred spirits. He found work as an assistant, first with the sculptor Denis Mitchell and then with Hepworth. The grande dame of British sculpture was a tough employer and money was so short for his new wife, Doreen, and their children that O'Casey worked part-time at the local telephone exchange as well. He later recalled being asked to smash Hepworth's unwanted plaster sculptures with a sledgehammer. "Very satisfying," he recalled.
A black-and-white photograph of O'Casey with Doreen and their three small children from the 1960s seems to sum up this hopeful period. There is a studio with a large window, looking out on a clear sky, with a single wave breaking on to Porthmeor beach. That image, of the simple bands of colour of sky, sand and sea, is echoed in his first abstract paintings, and the photograph seems to capture the era when he came to terms with visual expanse and felt at home as an artist.
But O'Casey was also one for "silent companionship" and, as St Ives grew busier, he decamped in 1975 to the village of Paul, near Newlyn, on the opposite side of the Penwith peninsula. There he carried on making jewellery, but gradually, as times improved, shifted into sculpting in wax in the 1990s and works on paper. Towards the end of his career, he re-engaged with Ireland, which his father had left before he was born. To O'Casey, it was a more liberal, more European country than the Ireland of the 1920s, less tainted by the commercialism of art in Britain of the 1990s. He even spent time painting abstract landscapes in his mother's native Mayo, but opted eventually to remain in Cornwall.
There, despite suffering from muscular dystrophy, he worked every day, giving himself a present of "no more jewellery" on his 70th birthday. Painting – using simple geometric shapes, often arranged in rows of three, a number he found intriguing and magical, a shorthand for infinity – took up more and more of his time.
He liked to think of himself moving like an Indian sadhu or ascetic beyond his youth and into a busy middle age. "Then," he would say, "you become a philosopher. Finally, at the end, you give up everything and wander off into the distance with just a begging bowl."
He is survived by Doreen, their daughters, Duibhne and Oona, and a son, Brendan; and five grandchildren.
The Guardian, Tuesday 31 May 2011
http://www.cornwall-opc.org/Resc/cemeteries.php
Breon O'Casey, who has died aged 83, was one of the last survivors of two great traditions. As an artist, he was an important figure in the St Ives school, whose leading lights included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach. O'Casey's versatility as a jeweller, weaver, etcher, printmaker, engraver, painter and sculptor owed much to working among such talents.
But there was another dimension to the artist, who, as the sole surviving son of the Irish dramatist Seán O'Casey, provided a link to the Celtic literary revival. Born out of a movement that largely lacked a visual aspect, O'Casey filled a familial gap, becoming successful in a wide range of media that eschewed the written word.
This diversity was evident on a visit to his home, a converted stone farmhouse in Cornwall. O'Casey, a quiet man with a warm sense of humour, would open one door to reveal a giant printing press. Another room would be an emporium of beads, silver and stone, the raw materials of a jeweller's paradise. On the floors lay his woven rugs, inspired by the work of the Navajo people. He had made the hearth and the mantelpiece in the sitting room. After a studio full of canvases came a casting in bronze.
This sophistication resided in an artist who was both poetic and intent on discovering simplicity. Asked about the objects that interested him, he would respond that they were "not the wood, not the tree, but the leaf; not the distant view, but the hedge; not the mountain, but the stone". The patient, hopeful manner in which he went about his work, returning again and again to the same theme, building up the earthy textures of his paintings, he likened to the ways of a fisherman. "To paint," he said, "is to wait and watch, to try to listen to the picture, to chance a stroke, to hope for the best."
He was at times overshadowed by St Ives contemporaries, perhaps because his willingness to both draw on and acknowledge myriad influences may have slowed the emergence of a distinctive style. His repeated references in painting and sculpture to birds paid homage to the work of Georges Braque. He also saw himself as a "traditional innovator", rooted in the past, fascinated by ancient and non-western art. These influences can be seen in the primitive style of some of his sculpted figures. The Celtic mood of Cornwall and the distilled patterns of nature inspired his abstracted landscapes.
Although raised in a literary family, O'Casey was marked out for the visual arts from an early age. Seán O'Casey himself had so wanted to be a painter – an ambition frustrated by poor eyesight and early poverty – that in his later years he dressed the part, in coloured caps, cream jerseys and a deep-red dressing gown. "It was like sharing a house with Matisse," recalled his son.
Their home in Devon was filled with paintings, and Breon, on George Bernard Shaw's advice, was educated at the progressive Dartington Hall school, where there were paintings by Christopher Wood and Nicholson on the walls and a Henry Moore reclining figure in the gardens. He made his first jewellery in a metalwork room run by Naum Slutzky, a refugee from the Weimar Bauhaus.
During national service in 1946 with the Royal Artillery, his craving to be an artist persisted. The pin-up he put on his locker door was a Modigliani nude. "Bloody hell, O'Casey," declared his sergeant major. "What is this?"
Two years at the Anglo-French art centre in St John's Wood, north London, followed, where there was a heavy emphasis on Matisse, Braque, Miró, Giacometti, Utrillo, Renoir and Léger. But O'Casey spent much of the 1950s in comparative isolation with his parents in Torquay, painting and organising exhibitions of avant-garde artists. The decade, which he remembered as a dark time, "full of doubt and lethargy", was scarred by the death of his younger brother, Niall, from leukaemia.
It was his move to St Ives in 1959, after he saw a film about the painter Alfred Wallis, who lived in the town, that finally led O'Casey to kindred spirits. He found work as an assistant, first with the sculptor Denis Mitchell and then with Hepworth. The grande dame of British sculpture was a tough employer and money was so short for his new wife, Doreen, and their children that O'Casey worked part-time at the local telephone exchange as well. He later recalled being asked to smash Hepworth's unwanted plaster sculptures with a sledgehammer. "Very satisfying," he recalled.
A black-and-white photograph of O'Casey with Doreen and their three small children from the 1960s seems to sum up this hopeful period. There is a studio with a large window, looking out on a clear sky, with a single wave breaking on to Porthmeor beach. That image, of the simple bands of colour of sky, sand and sea, is echoed in his first abstract paintings, and the photograph seems to capture the era when he came to terms with visual expanse and felt at home as an artist.
But O'Casey was also one for "silent companionship" and, as St Ives grew busier, he decamped in 1975 to the village of Paul, near Newlyn, on the opposite side of the Penwith peninsula. There he carried on making jewellery, but gradually, as times improved, shifted into sculpting in wax in the 1990s and works on paper. Towards the end of his career, he re-engaged with Ireland, which his father had left before he was born. To O'Casey, it was a more liberal, more European country than the Ireland of the 1920s, less tainted by the commercialism of art in Britain of the 1990s. He even spent time painting abstract landscapes in his mother's native Mayo, but opted eventually to remain in Cornwall.
There, despite suffering from muscular dystrophy, he worked every day, giving himself a present of "no more jewellery" on his 70th birthday. Painting – using simple geometric shapes, often arranged in rows of three, a number he found intriguing and magical, a shorthand for infinity – took up more and more of his time.
He liked to think of himself moving like an Indian sadhu or ascetic beyond his youth and into a busy middle age. "Then," he would say, "you become a philosopher. Finally, at the end, you give up everything and wander off into the distance with just a begging bowl."
He is survived by Doreen, their daughters, Duibhne and Oona, and a son, Brendan; and five grandchildren.
The Guardian, Tuesday 31 May 2011
http://www.cornwall-opc.org/Resc/cemeteries.php
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