Art Exhibit ~ Mishcka O’Connor

I was a realist from the beginning, painting in oil and pastel, but now, for fifteen years, I am painting abstractly, mostly in acrylic. My creative process is unplanned and spontaneous. I start off with an impulse to do this or that and then either the painting is completed so easily it seems to paint itself or, alternatively, it develops in stages: changing this, taking out that, etc. This can take much longer.

In either case it is a process of following my intuition. The painting is done when there’s not one more thing to be done to it. It’s resolved. At this point I often feel it answers the questions I didn’t know I asked. However, regardless of what the meaning of the painting is for me, the viewer will read his/her own meaning into it.

I began using acrylics when I started painting abstracts. The quality of acrylics lends itself to my process. When the painting is fast and spontaneous acrylic paint lends itself to many interesting effects. If the process is more layered and changeable, the covering capacity and fast drying of acrylic makes it easy to work. Because of my background as a realist, my abstract work has structure and composition and sometimes a recognizable subject.

My inspiration through the years has been mostly the following artists: Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Dove, Howard Hodgkin, and the Tucson artist, Josh Goldberg, with whom I have studied abstract painting.