"I like the idea that painting is always a work in progress, much like life."

-- Artist Helen O'Leary

Helen O'Leary, assistant professor of art and abstract painter, considers her life and her
paintings works in progress. O'Leary has had a string of recent successes, including
winning a prestigious national award.
Photos: Greg Grieco

Artist explores the messiness of life

By Suzanne Wayne
Arts and Architecture

Helen O'Leary grew up on a 100-acre farm in Ireland. The death of her father and her mother's illness forced her and her sister to manage the farm alone.

"From the time I was 10 years old until I graduated from high school, I would get up every morning and milk 60 cows before school," she said. "While they were on the machines, I painted every cow's head on the wall. When the wall was filled, I would whitewash it, and start over again."

Those childhood lessons have not left O'Leary, now an assistant professor of art and abstract painter. She still marks the walls and floors of her studio along with her canvases.

"The idea of muck and mire -- now the filth of the studio and living -- intrigues me," she said.

For O'Leary, the messiness of painting is a metaphor for the messiness of life: "I like the idea that painting is always a work in progress, much like life."

O'Leary's large canvases represent the residue of painting -- the drips on the floor, the splatters on the artist's clothes, and the globs of paint on the palette -- more than a great masterpiece.

"I am not interested in the big heroic gesture of painting that is typically male, but in the 'unsaidness' (in the creation of a painting). Every minute of the day contributes to a painting," she said.

Her views on life and painting have led to many recent successes -- visiting professorships and solo exhibitions. Most recently, she was honored with the Joan Mitchell Award for Painting, a prestigious national award in which other artists nominate and select the winner.

Originally trained as a still-life artist, O'Leary's transformation into an abstract painter began at the Art Institute of Chicago when the residue remaining after completing her still life images inspired her. She connects her interest in the residue to her Irish heritage.

"I was brought up in a post-colonial country, and have experienced the residue left by the removal of a colonial power," she said. Irish authors, particularly James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, also have influenced her.

"I am intrigued by Joyce living in hotels in Europe all those years. He always expressed a desire for home to the people he met, yet he never went home. My image of home is like that, an imagined place that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is really made out of very small things," she said.

O'Leary, who has lived in the United States for 12 years, is currently studying ideas of dislocation and space and said the studio is really home. Testing this idea, she has actively sought visiting professor positions in Ireland, Spain and Australia. She also plans to visit Thailand this summer.

In addition to the visiting professorships, O'Leary has four solo exhibitions planned for this year in New York City; Perth, Australia; and Limerick and Cork, Ireland.

She displays her artwork produced in each place together with photographs of her studio in that place to demonstrate this idea. "Living outside your country allows you to be somewhat objective," she said. "There is strength in living somewhere else. You are not tied down by the conventions of home or of the place that you are visiting."