Hillary Pyle | Tony O’Malley Award Winner | The Irish Times | 1998
Innocent desire of award winner
CORK-BASED artist Tom Climent has been announced as winner of the inaugural Tony O’Malley Award at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.
Over 40 painters from north and south of Ireland submitted work to Kilkenny’s Butler Gallery with proposals as to what they would do with the £2,000 travel grant, meaning stiff competition for the young Cork artist.
Runners-up Barbara Freeman from Belfast, who has been transcribing musical compositions by Cage and Messaien into colour and space, and Robert Armstrong, imaging water and in particular the frozen pond at the Botanic Gardens in Dublin, were present when the judge’s decision was made public.
The Award, which will be presented annually, honours the 84 – year-old Kilkenny artist Tony O’Malley, who only recently presented a major exhibition of past and present work at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Sponsors of the award, Waterford Crystal, see their role of encouraging the visual arts in Ireland as an important one, and welcome the opportunity that the award will give artists to travel.
Tom Climent, winner of the Victor Treacy Award in 1996, intends to put the grant towards a visit to Italy to study the work of old masters. Much of his work has been inspired by artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Carravaggio, and not surprisingly, since he is half Spanish, by Velasquez and Goya. He will travel to Florence, Venice and Rome and his named Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X in the Palazzo Doria Pamphii as a work – apart from the Caravaggios -that he particularly wants to see.
Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny, Ireland www.butlergallery.com