Silver bead necklace interspersed with 11 garnets. All hand made with ring and loop clasp. He was the son of Sean O’Casey, the playwright. He was born in 1928 and died in 2011. His work is now being given greater importance.
Provenance from a private collection
£775
Breon O’Casey was a true polymath and was possibly unique in the combination of skills he possessed over so many mediums in a single career. He was a painter, printmaker, weaver, sculptor and jewellery maker and it is hard to think of any other contemporary artist and maker who was so broadly talented.
Son of the playwright Sean O’Casey (1880-1964), Breon spent most of his career in Cornwall, where he was closely associated with many of the painters, potters and sculptors of the St Ives movement. He arrived in the coastal town in the 1959 and served artistic apprenticeships under sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Denis Mitchell, and was friends with leading artists such as Peter Lanyon, John Wells and Tony O’Malley.
O’Casey’s abstract style was poetic and focussed on discovering the simplicity of objects and forms. For him there was ‘nothing new under the sun, but an infinity of arrangements’ and when asked about objects that captivated him it was ‘not the wood, not the tree, but the leaf; not the distant view, but the hedge; not the mountain, but the stone’. He would return to geometric motifs and natural forms again and again throughout his career and considered himself a ‘traditional innovator’, fascinated by ancient, primitive and non-western art, but imbuing it with his own poetic sensibilities and discoveries through all the creative channels he explored.
Although often overshadowed by his St Ives contemporaries, O’Casey’s legacy, talents and unique skills are now being reassessed, and greater importance given to his accomplishments beyond narrow and interlocked art circles.