Breon O'Casey

The farmhouse built of granite blocks where he lives now is sideways on at the end of a lane running away from the village. There is a garden with old fruit trees and high encircling stone walls like a medieval hortus closus. Beyond, wind-raked fields partitioned by thin hedges and broken backed trees run to the cliff’s edge a mile away. Inside the garden walls the sculpture studio stands nearest to the house. It served as his all-purpose workspace until ten years ago when he designed a new painting studio at a greater distance from the house. It is a chaste white space the size and shape of a small non-conformist chapel, with windows, set too high to see out of, which provide an effulgent light. Hepworth and Patrick Heron both claimed that this special quality of white light was the catalyst for their work in west Cornwall, but O’Casey thinks all this talk of special light is ‘balls’; it was a matter of safety in numbers, freedom from pubic opprobrium which made an artists’ colony of St Ives. And as for his lack of outside views, as he says, Alfred Wallis also worked from memory, painting the landscape experienced or remembered rather than observed.

Since he broke with St Ives his work has developed slowly and consistently, according to the ideals of craftsmanship learnt during his apprenticeships of the fifties and sixties. ‘Even if only for half an hour, always go into your studio every day just to keep the rhythm up,’ Hepworth had advised him. Sometimes he just reads the newspaper there, ‘and then your eye catches something and you’re off…’. Staying in the Irish countryside, he set a stack of sheets of paper in front of him and painted a shape or colour wash on each, adding another each day, until ‘to my surprise I found that the paintings that came out of this process began to look more like landscape than still-lives … that is to say, landscape as pattern.’

Extract from Breon O'Casey, A Decade written by Ruth Guilding, 2009