Artists
Breon O'Casey
Breon O'Casey was born in London, the son of the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey (1880-1964). In 1937 his family moved from London to Totnes in Devon.
Now in his 80's, he has been a highly productive and much-respected artist for four decades but his public reputation has only recently spread beyond certain interlocked art and craft circles. He has been a jeweller, a painter, an etcher, a weaver, and more recently he has taken to sculpture, a development that typifies the range and adoptability of this versatile artist. In each medium he has worked instinctively with a deep feeling for materials. As a painter he draws on nature's simple rhythmic forms to produce beautiful, sparse works bathed in colour. His palette is rich yet subtle, based on a lifetime's observation of the 'harsh, burnt sienna red of the glimpsed fox against the umber ploughed field' or 'the violets and purples of the bare trees against the grey Cornish skies'. An understanding of the expressive power of simplified shape, can be perceived within his sculpture. The bird features strongly, stripped down to a still, essential form which recalls ancient sculpture - condensed, quiet, but with an almost mystical presence. He has benefited from his friendship with some of the leading artists of his generation such as Peter Layon, John Wells and Tony O'Malley
For most of his career he has lived in Cornwall and has been closely associated with the St. Ives School of Painting. Now in his 80's, he is one of few practising artists remaining in the county who lived in St Ives in the 50s and who knew and worked along-side the artists that gave the colony its name. This gives him and his art a special aura for fans of Cornish modernism. One of the things that St Ives modernism achieved was a rapprochement between the French 'schools', and the more abstract American 'schools' of painting that came later, partly through Ben Nicholson's own working through of the implications of the former. It can therefore be argued that, perhaps via Nicholson's example, O'Casey has returned St Ives painting to its origins in Picasso, in the process by-passing some of the other influences that it became subject to.
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