Dipping back in time for some earthly inspiration
Ten-year old Mary O’Connor, on a Wexford Arts Centre art trip, had “an amazing day out” at the National Gallery. “We studied a Rembrandt painting and I was in heaven.”
School had been a struggle. Though she remembers nothing from Leaving Cert art, “art was my happy place. Mother Ursula used to shuffle and mutter around the place. I always imagined that the nuns were lined up and randomly pointed at, ‘You go and be the art teacher.’”
Wexford Opera Festival in her home town was pivotal to her development as an artist. Having worked backstage, making props and building sets, she wanted to study stage design but ended up at the College of Marketing and Design.
Her parents loved opera and the arts. “Growing up, there were six of us and we sort of brought ourselves up as both my parents worked. Organised chaos. We made a large wooden stage, painted sets and produced plays,” she says.
“Always drawing and creating, I was tasked with making things. I remember, after that dreadful IRA bombing [in 1976, when British ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs was killed in a car bomb], we all wrote Lady Ewart-Biggs a letter saying that a normal Irish family sympathised. I made a card and it was shown on BBC television when she was interviewed.”
College was “buzzing with atmosphere” and O’Connor graduated with a residency award for Kilkenny Design Centre and then, in “the great exodus of the mid-1980s”, she moved to London where she lived for six years. At Chelsea Art College, she studied traditional oil painting, worked as an interior designer and spent a year as a textile designer in Switzerland.
Then she went to New Zealand for five years, Belize for three, Kazakhstan for 11 – all places her husband was working in as a road engineer.
“The vibrant colours in New Zealand’s unpolluted air have stayed with me forever,” she says, and this made its way into her work. As did the “lush tropical jungle and the local attire” in Belize.
In Kazakhstan, O’Connor “struggled with this white winter landscape and -20C temperatures, but snow gave way first to mud, then to blissful flower-covered mountain meadows.
“When the snow came I painted white; when it lifted I painted in colour again. We travelled though all the ‘Stans’ – the enormous mountains and scenery are stamped in my memory forever.”
This “experimental and intuitive” work, called Retro, contains “my gestural self and my hardedge self”. She explains: “Surprise and chance are important. A few years back, I mastered the art of lipstick wearing. With dependable ‘Retro’ lipstick, life was great. Last March, Retro was no more. Though it seems frivolous, the work contains that Retro colour.”
A low-lying lake near Lugnaquilla, its shape and colour, becomes part of a painting. Standing stones and sea stacks become painted sculptural works. “There is no such thing as an abstract painting,” she says.
Hers hold secrets. “In Kazakhstan the locals were very secretive and I realised the Irish are purposely secretive too because of our colonial history.”
O’Connor, in her big, bright studio in Kiltiernan, paints and sculpts both Ireland and faraway places.
She loves being Irish: “We are the verbalisers of the world”.
Mary O’Connor’s new show, Ten, runs at So Fine Art Editions, Dublin, until September 28 and marks her 10 years back in Ireland. maryoconnorart.com