Elizabeth O’Reilly’s studio is in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, which is a former industrial area populated by bridges, a canal and geometric factory buildings. She has worked there for several decades and watched the area become less gritty and more gentrified. But the geometries remain.
Ordinarily, her summer is taken up with teaching, but in the year of the pandemic, she had free time to paint. She spent three months in Cushing, Maine, painting with her friend Lois Dodd. “She loves a painting buddy as do I,” O’Reilly says.
Campanula in Woods, oil on panel, 12 x 22"
Coneflower and Pink Leaf Blades, oil on panel, 17 x 11"
She has approached flowers off and on throughout her career even submitting a graduate school portfolio “mostly of flowers, anemones, which was not considered serious enough for graduate school, but they didn’t hold it against me, and they allowed me into the program.”
She has painted at Cushing for 30 years. “Having access to a beautiful garden has inspired me to paint flowers, but this summer was the first time I homed in on the interiors of the flowers. The paintings became more about portraits of the interiors rather than flowers in the garden setting, and without the garden environment, they became more abstract,” she says. “Generally, I would wander through the garden and find some unusual flower that attracted my attention, and then I would take it into the studio. Often, I started with some small studies on aluminum siding, but then I moved to larger panels and worked in a series until I felt I knew the flower well enough to move on. They are changing all the time which was what made it exciting. I think this year, of all years, was a time for many of us to get closer to nature.”
Opening Zinnia, oil panel, 16 x 13"
Her summer was “a kind of bliss. I might wander in the garden, find some zinnias, a fading coneflower, or a scabiosa to paint. Days and months passed in the studio, working side by side on our separate tables and on our separate paintings, with a companionable hum. I became quite fixated on one particular flower at a time. Lois would find some dried, later stage version of something from the garden or a drawing of a figure from her sketch group to paint. And so time passed. The flowers intrigued me, and I felt like I was getting to know their particular architecture, and their interiors. And, of course, the color was fascinating. When does one ever have the opportunity to use cadmium red in such quantities?”
The blossoms of her labor will be shown at George Billis Gallery in Westport, Connecticut, March 4 through 28. —
George Billis Gallery
166 Main Street • Westport, CT 06880
(212) 645-2621 • www.georgebillis.com
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