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Breon O'Casey by Dr Ruth Guilding Breon O'Casey is a traditional innovator. Now aged 78, he lives and works reclusively in West Cornwall, making paintings and sculptures shaped by the traditions of the St. Ives School, of which he became a part in the late 1950s. When the St. Ives experiment folded in the 70s he moved to the southern side of the Penwith peninsula. Since then his work has developed on an independent trajectory, in isolation from the contemporary art scene. The eldest son of Irish dramatist Sean O'Casey, his education during the war years was progressive, at Dartington Hall in Devon. Lucien Freud was in a higher class, and the Hepworth triplets came later, in a lower one. Bernard Leach founded a pottery there, the Bauhaus designer Naum Slutzky taught metalwork, and there were paintings and sculpture by Christopher Wood, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. After national service he studied at the Anglo French Art Centre in St John's Wood, where John Minton and Jacob Epstein were visiting lecturers. Later he learnt to sculpt at St Martin's School of Art, taught by Anthony Caro and Elisabeth Frink, who modelled his head in plaster. St. Ives in the late 50s was an artist's utopia. Here were Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, John Wells, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Patrick Heron. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, now separated, were its uncrowned King and Queen. On arrival O'Casey fell in with the Welsh sculptor Denis Mitchell, and began working part-time in Hepworth's studio along with Frost and Wells, to supplement the pittance brought in by their paintings. Frost and O'Casey remembered these as the happiest days of their lives. The paintings which he made during this period in his Porthemor studio, literal translations of the landscape through a single window framing beach, sea and sky, evolved gradually into abstraction. In 1960 he began to exhibit with the Penwith Society of Arts, showing his work alongside Leach, Hepworth, Frost and Mitchell. In the 1970s O'Casey retreated to a granite farmhouse in Paul, a few wind bitten fields away from the sea, surrounded by the outhouses which are his studios. Now he paints or models for only a few hours each afternoon. His paintings are "abstractions with landscape or still-life elements", translating his experience and memories of the landscape, with a repertory of simple geometric forms, circles, half-moons, triangles and squares, often repeated in threes. He works in acrylics, layering his tones and framing one compositional element or passage of vivid colour with another, sometimes within concentric rectangles of constrasting or blended colour. He also sculpts birds and fishes, simple votive or hieroglyphic forms, cast in bronze or welded from painted or brightly patinated sheet metal, although his paintings are almost always abstracts; "Why this is, I don't know, nor do I care. It's as well to let questions like that alone". Artists and private collectors who have bought his work include Barbara Hepworth, John Wells, Tony and Jane O'Malley (see lots 258-260), Conor Fallon and Nancy Wynn-Jones, Basil Blackshaw, Carolyn Mullholland, Robert Adams and Margaret Gardiner. Other examples are in the Tate Gallery, London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Kunstsammlungen der Vests Coburg and the Pforzheim Museum; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Dartington Hall; Leeds Museum and Art Gallery and the Arts Councils of Great Britain, Ireland and Northern Ireland. He continues to exhibit in Ireland, America and Britain, and especially in Cornwall.

Breon O'Casey (b. 1928)

Level Bird

Details

Breon O'Casey (b. 1928)
Level Bird
signed with initials and numbered 'II/V BO'C' (on the base)
bronze with a light brown patina
30½ in. (77.5 cm.) long

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

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