What lies beneath
Fixing the Familiar
At NCAD, Lesley-Ann O’Connell captured “everyday environments — office spaces, airports, shopping centres” and loved their “sombre moodiness”.
But by the time she did a masters, O’Connell became “more interested in the substance of paint, what it could do as a medium. I became more experimental in my approach, in laying down the paint, applying it thickly, thinly, albeit within the context of representation. I started drawing still lifes, views, pets, in marker to avoid the trap of accuracy and accept the lines as they happen, blew up the drawings on a photocopier, became attracted to the floating abstracted marks and unique shapes they created and I started to make paintings from them.”
Hooked, she “sometimes abandoned actual colours in favour of colours that might evoke a particular mood or feeling”.
O’Connell grew up in Co Meath. “Being on the outskirts and isolated, my sisters and friends would conjure up games. You could really run free.” At school she had great art teachers.
Now, back in Meath, “in a house on a hill with breathtaking views”, being alone in her studio is “like entering your own world or ecosystem. It’s the place I feel most powerful and mostly myself.” Next up, a residency in Spain in April.
Fixing the Familiar is a joyful, playful, energetic work, “a sort of abstract landscape in my head”.
Unhappy with the first few layers, she “threw turpentine over them to loosen the paint and then smudged the surface with a paint roller. Some of the paint marks reverberated like a pattern across the surface when I went over them with the roller. At one point I printed a left-over palette onto the surface because I thought the lumps of colour could work and break my expectation of what the painting might look like.
“The three blocks of colour in the centre were to be fully resolved but I grew to really enjoy them as they were because they bounced off the subtle greens and yellows of the background and created tension.”
Abstract attracts her for its colour, lines, marks, forms, for its freedom of interpretation. “An abstract painting can suggest something to you of a place, environment, a feeling but still remain elusive”. The title Fixing the Familiar came later. “I try to underline a quality that might be latent in the painting or an aspect through the title, to keep them open-ended.”