bio
My eye is drawn to color events, such as an especially bright tv screen or the breathtaking blue of the wrong side of the sunrise. Color is what I think of, see and relate to. Color is an emotional event. They permeate my subconscious, retrieved when I stare at a canvas, the empty white surface annoying me.
In my work, I begin by covering large surfaces with color, quickly breaking down them down into chaos. I then strive to organize the chaos, contemplating the canvas, waiting for it to speak to me. It’s an active process, directed by intuition. A night could be spent furiously mixing colors, glazing certain areas of the canvas and applying wax shapes to others. It also might be passed sitting for hours gazing at the canvas trying to see, hear, or feel what I need to do next. The painting tells me the colors and shapes it needs. How this works is something of a mystery to me.
My goal is to create work that are not easily forgotten. I wish to affect my viewers deeply, sharing something as strong as what I feel when I look at a piece I’ve just finished. This feeling is akin to the breath leaving my lungs in awe as I looked over the Atlantic Ocean very early one spring morning and saw a blue I cannot yet describe.
Michelle O'Connor was a working artist living in San Francisco. She grew up in Bloomfield, CT and had her training at the Massachusetts College of Art. She passed away in 2001.
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