Tony O'Malley was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenney in 1913. He worked for many years as a clerk with the Munster and Leinster Bank but after contracting tuberculosis and long periods in sanatoria and hospitals, he was retired from the bank and this led him in his forties to pursue a long-desired career as a full-time painter.

For the next thirty years O'Malley lived in Cornwall where he came into contact with many of the leading figures in the community of artists there, including Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Bernard Leach, Terry Frost and Bryan Wynter.

In 1973 he married the Canadian painter Jane Harris, and together they made regular visits to the Isles of Scilly and the Bahamas. Islands, both geographical and spiritual, figure much in his painting, especially the wild and historic Clare Island, the seat of the O'Malley clan, where his father was born. In 1990, the O'Malleys returned to Ireland to settle in Physicianstown, close to the artist's home town of Callan.

In spite of his long exile, O'Malley is a quintessentially Irish artist, imbued with intense feelings for the tribal, the local and the family. Entirely self-taught, particularly in his early years when he was cut off from outside artistic influences, he was obliged to invent his own visual language and to develop an independence of spirit - technical and psychic impulses to which he has always remained true.