Breon O'Casey: Painting Is Another Language

Pangolin London presents a new exhibition of paintings and prints – many never seen before – by prominent St Ives artist Breon O’Casey. Bringing together the greatest number of paintings ever presented to the public, Painting is Another Language will also display some of the painter’s early works.

As the son of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey whose passion for visual art almost led him to become a painter himself, Breon O’Casey grew up surrounded by art in an environment that gave him the impression that he ‘[shared] a house with Matisse’. Consequently, Breon began to paint at a young age and often used his family as models, as shown in the photograph below, taken by famous photographer Gjon Mili, of a young O’Casey painting his sister Shivaun reading in the early 1950s.

Known for his wide-reaching style that encompassed both the figurative and the abstract, Breon O’Casey’s work is founded on a series of repetitive motifs; from simple, bold images of birds and hills reminiscent of Braque and Matisse, to his use of colourful triangles, spirals and polka dots in constructing landscapes rich with emotion. Occasionally, O’Casey drew inspiration from literature or mythology – for example, his Leda and the Swan paintings or his Three Graces, which are shown here together for first time.