4.
Images:
1. A Moment of Kindness, Acrylic on Raw Canvas, 24”x24”, 2026.
2. A Place Outside of Time, Acrylic on Raw Canvas, 24”x24”, 2026.
3. In Here After All, Acrylic on Raw Canvas, 70”x52”, 2026.
4. Everything That Went Away, Acrylic on Raw Canvas, 24”x 24”, 2026.
@bartoreilly
I spent the summer working outside on large sheets of raw canvas. The title for this series comes from a painting I made early on called This Vastness of Reaches. I was working on a large scale with the canvas on the ground and found the process to be quite physical. The title refers to the act of reaching to make marks. But This Vastness of Reaches implies the seemingly infinite reaches of nature and the thrill of working under an open and ever-changing sky.
Rather than use
landscape as a referent, the work is directly affected by its placement in the
environment. As I paint, I am open to chance and the direct effects of weather.
I notice and allow the ways in which gravity affects the work. On hot sunny
days the sun affects my color choices and the acrylic’s drying time. Nature is
a collaborator, yet I do not fully surrender authorship. I choose the colors, when
to soak the canvas with a hose or pour paint from buckets. I decide when to brush
on or remove or what parts to leave untouched. Working on the ground with unstretched
canvas means creases and folds form on the surface from the earth and grass
underneath. These variants in turn affect how the washes and pigments settle
and pool.
I’m interested in
the raw and elemental. Earth, rocks, water, light, land and color. The paintings
are associative. Color on cloth has its own life. This collaboration with form
and chance, this act of letting go and immersing in what happens outside on a
large scale is a huge liberation after long winter months painting indoors.
Philosophically I ask what comes from human effort? Are we ever truly separate
from all that appears outside of us? We cannot exist alone without water,
sunlight, grass, or earth. It is not me and then everything else. There is just
everything, just one.
I want to record
the birdsongs, but cars keep passing by. Is it romantic to wish the cars away? They
are part of my environment. They are not separate from the birds. Cars don’t
distract me from the birdsong; they are part of the world’s song. In fact, the very
idea of cars and birds are concepts. We are trained to isolate things. Our
brains operate that way. There are just sounds, light and atmosphere. In this
sense the painting’s rhythms are musical.
The work
seeks to encounter what is already there without isolating it into the
birdsong, the hose, the sunlight, the nest, the trees, the shadows. Even these
sentences do it. Language is constructed in ways that parse and discern things.
Painting offers something else. Something all-encompassing for me. Working on
the ground means I am moving around from all sides. This removes the fixed
perspective of the wall or the easel. Up and down become irrelevant. It is a
more physical and immersive way of painting. My interest is in form and how to
capture the ephemeral. The series title comes from this poem I wrote after one
of my first days painting outdoors.
The weather
mattered
Under a leafy tree
Tracing with me
Not why patterns
My patterns
My process is fixing clouds that come across the sky.
Bio
Bart O'Reilly is an Irish-born painter living and
working in Maryland. His paintings explore the relationship between processes,
materials and their environment and the unpredictability of the natural world.
Working primarily with acrylic on raw canvas, he develops compositions through
successive acts of addition, removal, and exposure to weather, allowing water,
gravity, and time to become active participants in the formation of the image.
The resulting works inhabit a space between abstraction and landscape, where
themes of memory, absence, and perception emerge through the behavior of the
materials themselves.
O'Reilly received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the
National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2000, and a Master of Fine Arts
from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. In 2022 he published My
Father's Work Shed, a collection of poetry and paintings, with Wipf and
Stock Publishers.
His work has been exhibited in the United States and Ireland and is held in
private collections internationally.
#sundrawing, #sunpainting, #naturalelementpainting, #processpainting, #paintingdrawing, #paintingintheenvironment, #artintheenvironment, #artprocesses, #recordsofinteraction, #sunart, #sunandphotography, #artinnature, #weatherandart, #processart, #systemsandpainting, #systems, #artandsystems, #artinnature
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