§ Breon O'Casey (British 1928-2011) Landscape on Brown, 1997 signed and dated in pencil (lower right), signed, titled and dated (to backboard), mixed media on paper (28.5cm x 40.5cm (11 1/4in x 16in)) Provenance Yew Tree Gallery, Cornwall. Breon O’Casey was part of one of the later waves of young avant-garde artists drawn to the bustling fishing settlement of St Ives, arriving in his clapped-out orange Ford transit in 1959. A studio assistant of Denis Mitchell and of the inimitable Barbara Hepworth, O’Casey became a member of the Penwith Society of Arts and an active participant in the artistic life of the town. Highly productive and constantly experimental, O’Casey moved across different media with ease, with his visual language translating across such diverse artforms as painting, jewellery, printmaking, weaving and sculpture. This broad skillset made him relatively hard to pin down from a critical point of view and possibly explains why the spotlight took its time to home in on this fascinating and respected figure within the St Ives School. Since O’Casey’s death in 2011 however, curators and collectors have driven a wave of renewed appreciation of the work of this fascinating polymath. Unconstrained to one medium, simple shapes of undulating and geometric form recur across much of his work. So too does a distinctive palette of earthy brown tones disrupted by jewel-like reds, greens and blues. His reference points are diverse: from his family roots in the Celtic revival (his father was Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey) and his interest in ancient and non-Western culture (for example the Navajo-inspired geometric patterns which appear in his weaving), to the distilled modernist forms of the Bauhaus and the work of St Ives forebears like Ben Nicholson. One key recurring motif is the number three, which took on an almost magical quality for O’Casey. We can note this in the iconography of some of the pieces offered here. In the 1966 assemblage, Construction, we find three simple bands of colour reading as an abstracted, minimalistic take on a natural landscape, to the more monumental Duo, which places three band-like shapes to delineate space in the pictorial plane. Sculpture became an increasing preoccupation, with O’Casey commenting that it “…took the place of weaving and jewellery as the antidote to painting. At first as a sideline, a relief from the anxieties of paint. But gradually it has taken on a more important role and I can say now that it is at least as important to me as painting and I devote an equal amount of time and thought to it.” O’Casey also remarked that, unlike his wholly abstract work in two dimensions, he was almost always drawn to figuration in his sculptural work, very often depicting birds or animals. In the excellent examples offered here we find his deceptively simple balancing act between modern and ancient lexicons, as well as the sense of an artist revelling in the joy of his craft.