Selected from his studio by his daughter and fellow jeweller Duibhne Gough, the collection of works that make up the tribute exhibition to the late Breon O'Casey bear testament to what a consummate and extraordinary artist he was.

An all-rounder, being painter, printmaker, sculptor, weaver and jeweller, throughout his long and distinguished career he exhibited his paintings, prints, sculptures, woven rugs and jewellery in this country and abroad, from St Ives to Oxford, Leeds to London, Dublin to New York. Shortly before he died last year, he enjoyed exhibitions in Somerset House in London and the Stoneman Gallery in Penzance.

A member of Penwith Society of Arts and its chairman for several years, he is now represented in any number of private and public collections from Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery to Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, plus the Arts Council collections of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

The son of Irish dramatist Sean O'Casey, it was almost 70 years ago that George Bernard Shaw wrote to his father advising him that his son Breon should change his name.

"He will be greatly hampered by his father's name if he doesn't," he wrote.

For once, the celebrated GBS was wrong and obviously didn't know the boy he was writing about. The young Breon O'Casey ignored his advice and, without having either to deny his famous father's name or deigning to trade upon it, went on to carve out a career and to gain a considerable reputation in his own right.

As a boy he attended Dartington Hall school, where he was taught by the ex-Bauhaus teacher Naum Slutski, and afterwards studied at the Anglo-French Art Centre in London where he met and became friends with the eminent Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. It was, however, the "old man of the sea", primitive painter Alfred Wallis who, quite unwittingly, brought him to St Ives. As he once said: "I remember seeing a film about Wallis's work and I thought St Ives seemed to be a good place for a modern artist. I came to live here in the late 1950s. It was a move I never regretted."

It was there he met and married Doreen Corscadden, a young lady from Northern Ireland.

For three years, following in the footsteps of such St Ives stars as Denis Mitchell, John Wells and Terry Frost, he worked as a studio assistant to Barbara Hepworth and was later to say: "I learned most of the artistic ropes from Dame Barbara and dear Denis."

He also became a close friend of Irish painter Tony O' Malley, then living in St Ives, and it is not surprising that rubbing shoulders with such creative people encouraged and inspired him. One best described perhaps as a primitive abstract painter, it is highly likely that if Alfred Wallis had painted purely from his imagination rather than from "what used to be out of my own memory" then the images he made on his scraps of card would have borne a close resemblance to the soft-edged geometric but non-mathematical shapes so central to Breon O'Casey's compositions.

Like so many artists, the early years of his career were a struggle and, as well as working for Barbara Hepworth, he had other jobs, from part-time teacher to telephonist.

"I manned the St Ives exchange, long before STD, in the evenings and on Sundays. They were hard-up but happy days. They were times, too, when those who used tools were as respected as those who wielded brushes."

For a while I had the privilege and pleasure of teaching in Camborne alongside Breon and I can vouch for the success he made of that job.

Although he sometimes considered moving to Ireland in the mid-1970s, he and his wife Doreen and their children moved instead to the village of Paul near Penzance where, despite being handicapped by muscular dystrophy, he not only continued to create but went on to produce some of his best pieces. One who often spoke of himself as being a jack of all trades, Breon O'Casey was more than that. A multi-talented, modest man, he nevertheless remained something of a maverick.

An artist stimulated by the shock of the old rather than the new, his seemingly naive organic shapes, dressed in muted colours, could well be from another age: from a peaceful period when people had time to stand and stare, to contemplate and consider the meaning of life, and to question whether or not the journey they were about embark upon was really necessary.

The thread which ties together the various strands of Breon O'Casey's work is that of simplification. He was fond of saying: "I'm always simplifying." And there is nothing superfluous in anything he did; he pared his work to the bone in the belief that he could make as strong a statement with three shapes as he could with six. At the same time as he trimmed away all unnecessary decorative frills from his work, he never lost sight of or was out of touch with his inherent sense of good design, and the delicate balance between colour, form, shape and size.

This exhibition, which opens at Newlyn Art Gallery tomorrow and contains a number of notebooks, photographs and other archival material, is not only a splendid and moving tribute but emphasises how much Breon O'Casey – "a gentle giant of an artist and man" – is still missed. It continues until April 28 and admission is free.