Sentimental Meandering of a Fictitious Past

Rhea O'Neill (1983 - )

Oil and gloss on canvas

2008

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© Rhea O'Neill, courtesy of Rollo Contemporary Art

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  • About the work
    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.

  • Explore
    Places
    Subjects
    landscape C21st
    Materials & Techniques
    canvas, gloss, oil, oil painting
  • Details
    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