Press Articles About Brendan O'Connell
He's got his eyes on the aisles
Boston Globe article
Walmart: a convenient place for inexpensive one-stop shopping, or a corporate behemoth?
Painter Brendan O’Connell has his own take on the mega-store. “It’s the perfect petri dish to try [to] capture beauty,’’ he says. “The place holds an infinite number of color patterns and people’s gestures.’’
The artist has an exhibit at LaMontagne Gallery devoted exclusively to his portrayals of Walmart. Although Walmart has been a lightning rod for criticism of big-box stores and controversial labor practices, O’Connell doesn’t see himself as a political painter or a social commentator. “By no means am I an apologist for Walmart,’’ he says, noting that he has been asked to leave more Walmarts than most people have shopped in. He takes pictures in the stores to base his paintings on, though without permission from the retailer. MORE HERE
Brendan O'Connell at Morgan Lehman
Art in America, Oct, 2006 by Joe Fyfe
Brendan O'Connell's experience is decidedly populist: he honed his craft during the seven years he spent as a street-portraitist in Paris, Barcelona and Rome. Since returning to the U.S., specifically to rural Connecticut, O'Connell has taken up a subject that is consistent with his artistic trajectory--walmart.
This is by no means an insignificant subject. The discount chain's long, high aisles and adjacent areas have become vital public meeting places in suburban and rural America. Like it or not, they are our equivalent of the plazas of European cities.
The country's largest private employer, walmart merges two architectural phenomena developed in earlier eras: the panopticon prison, where inmates were under constant surveillance, and the arcade, where 19th-century consumers were first surrounded by a dazzling array of manufactured goods. As has been recently reported, many of walmart's employees have been coerced into working additional hours off the clock, have been denied benefits and union representation, and are so closely supervised that the in-house term for two employees engaged in discussion is "conspiring."
O'Connell bases his walmart paintings on drawings and photographs done onsite. The paintings have an on-the-fly quality, a journalistic brusqueness that depicts either close-ups of shelved merchandise or long views of shopping aisles populated by store workers or customers. O'Connell foregrounds a scrappy, blotchy paint application of flat acrylic over a thickly knifed gesso ground. This impressionistic style is reminiscent of Pissarro's late cityscapes of Haussmann's Paris, another design intended for the dual purposes of consumerist spectacle and crowd control.
O'Connell utilizes a palette of slightly spoiled pastel colors. Flesh is rendered sulfur yellow and the interiors and various products have a wonderfully rancid cheeriness about them that Edvard Munch might have understood. O'Connell's project appears to unite aspects of both vulgarity and transcendence. Candy Aisle (2005), for example, depicts a late-adolescent girl wearing cutoff jeans and T-shirt, lost in her thoughts as she reaches one arm backwards to steady her shopping cart. This protagonist appears in a number of other works. One wonders about the point of placing this babe among the other figures, who, in their leaden frumpiness, seem to bring out the deadeningly prosaic incarceration that walmart employees endure. Still, O'Connell has found an interesting subject that may continue to yield engaging results.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
Harmony in WalMart: Brendan O’Connell’s Recent Paintings
In 2003, an Economist cover blurted “Learning to Love WalMart” to a shocked but overstuffed audience of self-consumed consumers. It was, after all, their capitalist dream of overnight efficiency – getting every momentary desire satisfied faster and harder than yesterday – that the Walton family had succeeded in realizing. So if you hate Walmart, the cover smirked, blame your desire, not ol’ Sam. This is what you want.
What Brendan O’Connell relishes is what the rest of us try to hide from: while we sneak in the back door and cruise the gun department in sunglasses, Brendan parades in the fluorescent front with a tank-topped and short-shorted hottie named Harmony, and, giving her free pass to consume, touch, stroke, handle Walmart as freely as capitalist utopia would have her, he records it: desire.
These are Paintings. Touched, stroked, handled Paintings. Not slick and mechanical, not the photographic analogue to some imagined pristine consumer surface. No, these are nasty, worked, sweated and labored and risky Paintings, like the sweaty, dirty truth of desire, like the murky truth of the capitalist dream.
Deftly and energetically, O’Connell works his surfaces with broad washes and sharp jabs of color, half-definitions of product labels and flesh we easily fill in: from Harmony’s perfect thighs to the fat and happy Quaker pilgrim, we get small simple keys that unlock what we already know, what we already want.
What O’Connell’s brush reveals, that no advertising lens and packaging strategy can hide from him, is what’s really beneath the perfectly attractive surface, inside the focus-group-driven product placement, and supporting the endless arranged cues for consumption. His brush traces our desire, the preconscious nuggets of survival-driven want that Walmart – and Harmony -- so exactingly corral.
And the artist has no need to scratch an angry itch about it -- no desire to make himself or us or Walmart feel bad about it. Our desire, even for Walmart, is, after all, just what we are, and, he suggests, if we can go for it like Harmony in the boundless layers of light and color and space he gives us for free, then we’re doing alright with our wants and needs.
Jeff Perrott
January 2006
Cornwall Art To Hit China
By: Nancy Barnes 04/17/2008
Artist Brendan O'Connell stepped into his studio in a barn across a country road from his home in Cornwall and glanced over his shoulder to the left. "Here's the walmart," he said, referring to a coterie of paintings stacked against the walls that will shortly go on display in Shanghai.
Having at first painted his flat, acrylic works of the interior of this country's largest discount retailer on wood, he now paints them on a canvas he picked up in Beijing. The products he depicts in store-lit, somewhat sullied colors, which are rendered from photographs and drawings he completed inside a number of walmart stores, are manufactured in China. And in one work, a nubile blonde stands in front of shelves whose brand names have morphed into Chinese characters.
"Blondes. Hollywood blondes," he said of the perennially bottle-blond women in his good-sized works. "We don't have anything else that [the Chinese] really want," he said. Mr. O'Connell, who has even begun painting a small rendering of a package of Quaker Oats with a Chinese face instead of the standard Quaker's visage as the label joked that his paintings will be "our only export to China this year."
Still, stepping back from one work, he noted that the paintings can be beautiful, with what he termed the stores' weird green light.
"I've been thrown out of six different walmarts in the East Coast," he said of his studies for the series, noting that the retailer does not permit visitors to take photographs inside its stores.
The tall, dark-haired artist, dressed on a weekday in paint-splattered jeans, has exhibited paintings from the walmart series he began five years ago to acclaim at the Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York's Chelsea art district. "I've gotten more attention on the walmart paintings than anything else," he said.
And inside his two-story studio, the artist, who has an aversion to being typecast, has a strong collection of works in both abstract and figurative styles."'Green, I love you green,'" he said at one point, quoting from the poem "Romance Sonambulo" by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, as he pulled out an abstract painting in tints of green, one of a number of artworks he completed during the year he dedicated to working solely in what can be a fugitive color.
"When I was in Europe, I was primarily an abstract painter," he said, thinking back to 1991. Then, as a graduate of Emory University with a dual major in philosophy and Spanish literature, he went to Paris, thinking he would write a novel. (He did. It remains unpublished, and, at present, he has completed three.) "I started drawing when I was 21," he said, noting that he went on to become a portraiturist on the streets of Paris. There, he found it possible to earn as much as $400 on Bastille Day-and $200 in early 1990s francs on other good days-by completing pencil drawings while on the wide French boulevards. He quit the language positions he had taken to support himself in France some months later.
He credits his veering toward the arts, as opposed to making the more conventional trek talented members of his generation made to places such as Silicon Valley, to professors he had known at Emory, as well as to the artists and writers he came to know in Europe. Writers, he decided, were not very happy people, and he found himself in need of more instant gratification than the satisfaction they gained from years spent writing long tomes. Visual art, however, he found freeing.
"There's a liberating quality," he said of what drew him to what he termed his off-the-menu career in the visual arts.He cites groups of artists as diverse as the Fauves, the German Expressionists, the Nabis and the French Abstract-Expressionist artists of the 1950s, such as Pierre Soulages (b. 1919) and Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955), as influences on him.
Perhaps a fondness for Mr. Soulages, whose work relies heavily on black, contributed to his engagement with sheets of black acrylic. Upon the sheets, the artist, who termed himself in Europe a closet-figurative painter, at first envisioned an image of Rembrandt. From this confluence of an artist and the cast black acrylic grew a series of paintings of apostolic figures in the art world-portraits of men such as Vincent van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard-that, according to Mr. O'Connell, permit the personality of the artist to come through on portraits that peer from black. Simultaneously, the spectator is able to view himself in the background of the work as he gazes in to its smooth and somewhat glossy surface.
Now working on his figurative paintings for the walmart series on his studio's first floor, he is also completing one-foot-square abstract paintings on the second-trying, he said, to make big paintings out of small ones. In these, at least two of which came from images he saw in his dreams, his skill with color reveals itself in full, with the hot cadmium reds and the curious shade of purple that recurs throughout his work occupying fields of dark greens in some works, and a thick impasto of purple and blue cast across a ground that is the color of sand in another.
And while he conceded that abstract art is currently out of fashion (too many, he thinks, find it decorative), he said, with barely a shrug of his shoulders, "It doesn't stop me from doing it. It may," he remarked, "stop me from selling it."
Indeed, the artist, who is now 40 years old, concedes that he has spent the last 10 years trying to marry his abstract and figurative inclinations. As a consequence of his walmart series, he may have found a way to do just that.
To the right of the small abstract paintings on the second floor of his studio, he has a group of paintings that consist visually of more than one image. One sets an image in the style of the Hudson River School of Art above a painting of a row of abstracted Campbell soup cans shelved, as if they were sitting in an aisle in a walmart. Another includes an image in a figurative style, somewhat in the manner of contemporary artist Eric Fischl, with, in the same work, the Tide and Gain laundry detergent cartons that walmart sells.
The paintings, which join others that juxtapose classical images with abstracted shapes, stand, according to the artist, as "more of a critique of where the art world is now," just as, in his walmart series, he concedes he is playing, in part, with the concept of commercialism.
Of the artists he enjoys who are working today, he includes Jonathan Lasker-whose work questions the credibility of art-and the 70-something "artist's artist" Richard Tuttle, whose small works streamlined in both color and shape have experienced something of a renaissance since the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art organized a highly acclaimed retrospective on him several years ago.
"I believe that art should try to communicate," said Mr. O'Connell, whose star is justifiably on the rise. "So many of the paintings I see now don't have a sense of passion."To complement his exhibition at the Refined Nest Gallery in the gallery district of Shanghai, Mr. O'Connell, who has exhibited in Italy and Canada in addition to his exhibitions at the Morgan Lehman Gallery in both Lakeville and New York, has received a Boschen Porter Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Association for a bilingual catalogue. Mr. O'Connell said his exhibition, which was arranged by the contemporary Chinese artist Yuan Sun he met on a trip to Berlin, is scheduled to open in late June.
©Litchfield County Times 2008
