Elizabeth O'Reilly
Paintings

March 5 - April 2, 2003

With a pronounced edginess dominating contemporary art, the very mention of plein air (in open air) painting produces a rather quaint image in ones mind. A painter, palette in hand, working on an outdoor motif seems as distant as one can get from the media-savvy conjuring to which we are accustomed at this end of the modernist experiment. But an equally pervasive openness, allowing artists to work in any manner they feel serves their vision, goes a long way toward dissipating any sense of anachronism. It seems only fair to claim that in today's stylistic free-for-all, all techniques are on an equal footing. Video events, autobiographical remnants, formaldehyde horrors, or plein air paintings can all be seen as serving a consistent, familiar purpose - the communication of things to deep for mere description.

And besides, categorization reveals little in the analysis of individual works of art. Even among plein air painters of the recent past there is a diversity of vision that tempers an emphasis on shared technique. Compare Edward Hopper's brooding roadside vignettes with Fairfield Porter's sunny backyards and you can see how, even in the eye of the modernist storm, sensibility and subject matter provide the better part of meaning. Elizabeth O'Reilly paints plein air today, and it is to her mastery of this technique that we can attribute the light, spontaneity and overall painterly cohesion so obvious in her work. But her subject matter is very much her own.

Emigrating from Ireland in 1986 she has endured the relatively new experience of a continued familiarity with her place of origin alongside her adopted home. With transportation and communication being so much easier today, Elizabeth rode the emotional displacement of emigration in rapid forward and reverse modes, initially leaving her with a sense of belonging to neither. Having first been drawn to subjects found in the abandoned towns of West Ireland, it took her some time before she recognized the industrial ruins of the Gowanus Canal as kindred to their domestic counterparts across the Atlantic.

As a painter she is now at home in abandoned precincts found in any landscape, which is to say her work has expanded to become an expression of passage to an emotional state between location and memory.

Paintings in this exhibition were chosen from work completed in Ireland, New York, and Vermont. Each is a reflection on sentiment deeply felt, by an artist whose talents prove particularly effective in rehabilitating that which ties many of us to a special patch of earth.

Peter Malone
curator

Exhibition Checklist
(all images are oil on hardboard unless otherwise indicated)

Silver Light from Third Street Bridge, 2002 ... image

Third Street Bridge, Reflections in Green, 2001

Smith & Ninth Platform, 2000

Michelle's Rock, 1994

Vermont Waterfall from Above, oil on canvas 1993

Roaring Water, 1994

Icycles, 1994

White Pool at Nephin Mountain, 2000

Potato Ridges, Lois na Rann, 1998

The Rock, 1997

On the Corofin Road, 2001

Golden Leaves, 2000

Third Street Bridge from Caroll Street, 2001

In a Corner, Ballycastle, 2000

Pylons Under the Hamilton Avenue Bridge, 1999

Reflections of Expressway, Ninth STreet Bridge, 2001

Tanks and Water, Red Hook, 2003

Union Street Bridge, Gowanus Canal, 2001

Corofin Road, the Burren, 2001

White Foam, Coast Road, County Clare, 2001

Toor Pier, Cork, 2001

Downpatrick Head and Ocean, 1997

Ballyroan from Below, 2001