At twenty-one Brendan O’Connell graduated from Emory and moved to Paris to write a novel and find a different life. On November 11, 1991 he picked up a pencil and started sketching for the first time. Six months later he quit his language teaching job and decided to devote his life to painting. Brendan copied Durers and abstracted from Delacroix and was fortunate to explore in depth many of the Spanish and French painters, and many collections in Switzerland.

A British painter invited Brendan to live in his castle in the south of France. There he spent a couple of winters alone painting and thinking. In the summers he earned a living by doing portraits and caricatures in the street, an arduous task that increased his skill and deepened his commitment.

His paintings emerged out of the European landscape tradition and found fertile ground in Fifties French abstraction. Early on he painted outdoors and was taken with the intense colors of the German Expressionists and tempered by a certain tidiness in the Nabis. As Brendan developed with oils his work became more process oriented.

By nature Brendan is a colorist. His work explores color as spiritual identity. He uses color to portray the struggle of opposing forces, for instance, of gravity and transcendence. He often uses bold contrasts in an effort to create an expression of balance. Influenced by the color theories of Rudolf Steiner and the order and simplicity of the Tao by Lao Tsu, Brendan’s paintings have evolved into organic entities.

After six years living in Europe, dividing his time between visiting museums and working in the country on my own, Brendan returned to the States. At first he settled in Chelsea in Manhattan in hopes of working with other artists. Presently he works out of a barn in the country in Connecticut.