Sentimental Meandering of a Fictitious Past

Location

Country: Switzerland
City: Berne
Place: British Embassy

In this fanciful landscape poised between abstraction and representation, the view cuts through a forest clearing, with trees skeiny and soft like wilting cabbages.  A sense of hyper reality is created by the heightened colour and the fluid forms.  The artist, Rhea O’Neill, has commented that her interest lies in how we project our own memories and myths onto the landscapes that we grow up with: 

'Places we are fascinated by or have just seen in a chance passing that leaving a lasting impression on one’s mind. Whether the memory is based in fact or fiction does not seem to matter. We treasure certain trees and vistas and mourn them when they are destroyed but continue to have a cold, unfeeling policy towards their management. City trees are chopped and maintained within their allotted slot and turn into strange alien shapes, while environmental agencies attempt to return our woodlands to a ‘natural’ state (a state that in itself seems to be based in some sort of memory of what that may have been like). We seem to ignore the natural world’s own objective in pursuit of our own'.

O’Neill is concerned with the materiality of paint, often pouring the paint directly onto the canvas to allow her fluid, organic shapes to appear. This process allows her to work mainly from imagination and memory rather than to a pre-determined or rigid composition, adding to the element of fantasy and freedom in the work. Her use of vibrant colour, fantastic imagery and melting forms place her as one of a number of recent British contemporary landscape painters whose work provides a contemporary twist to the rich history of British landscape painting.

Places

Subjects

landscape C21st

Materials & Techniques

canvas, gloss, oil, oil painting

Artist

Rhea O'Neill (1983 - )

Title

Sentimental Meandering of a Fictitious Past

Date

2008

Medium

Oil and gloss on canvas

Dimensions

height: 164.00 cm, width: 219.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Rollo Contemporary Art, December 2008

Inscription

lower left: R O 4 J D (in cartouche)

Provenance

Rollo Contemporary Art

GAC number

18247