Fran O’Neill, Earthly Delight (2011), oil on canvas, 72″ x 72″; courtesy the artist and The New York Studio School
* * *
The range of sensation encompassed by Fran O’Neill’s abstract paintings is so various and allusive that you hardly notice her economy of means. O’Neill conjures up vast edifices, bottomless vortexes of space, nature’s abundance, the myths of pre-history and the virtual here-and-now with daunting, headlong immediacy. Flurries of slinking brushstrokes, swaths of grainy pigment and, in the lush abundance of Earthly Delight (2011), a stuccoed parade of purples and greens achieve metaphorical density through concentrated shifts in rhythm and density, light and pattern. And not a lot of paint, really. This is an artist who spends as much, and maybe more, time looking at her canvases as putting brush to them. Would that more painters were as circumspect, decisive and sure when the moment called for it.
The exhibition continues until October 13th.
© 2012 Mario Naves
Too Much Art 
Comments
Mario,
Thanks for the review of Fran O’Neill’s exhibit at The New York Studio School.
Appreciate your point about her ability to create numerous visual allusions and artistic memories via thought and purpose.
Stephen