The MORRISON GALLERY | Current Exhibit: Hugh O'Donnell More Reviews

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The Litchfield County Times | Top Stories
For the First Time, a Noted Artist Shows Locally
By: Nancy Barnes 06/21/2007

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KENT-The arterial growth that informs the work of painter Hugh O'Donnell will structure an exhibition in Kent, where the Washington resident's large paintings and smaller works on wood will go on display at the Morrison Gallery tomorrow.

The show by the British native, whose work resides in the collections of
museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Tate Gallery in London, will constitute his first exhibition in the state.

"I've got this mind that likes looking at the whole principle of things,"
said the artist, whose clients range from a corporate giant such as Verizon, which is headquartered in New Jersey, to Wisdom House in Litchfield, for whose chapel he recently completed windows.

" My work changed dramatically after coming here," he said of his move to Litchfield County from New York City in 1991. "A project began that was called 'Growing Things,'" he said of work he completed with children by Lake Waramaug that matured into a study entitled "Boy Echo." He said he and the children tried to develop a process of working from nature in a new way, as they used nature to confront the process of abstraction." The whole thing of being involved by trees," he explained. "The whole branching structure of being surrounded by trees. I wanted to figure out how I could do something like that in my work. So, an inquiry into growth began in Connecticut." The process, however, may have had its roots in an earlier time and a more distant place.

"Cornwall," he said, referring not to the town in Connecticut but to the
county in Southwestern England, where he attended arts college in Falmouth in 1969 after growing up in London. "That was my first break with my real urban life of the city. I got off the train and saw the sky in 3-D-cloud after cloud after cloud.

"I was disturbed, and then I saw the foliage and palm trees," he continued. " It was too much. I turned 'round and came back to London. And I decided, I have to go down there. Living by the sea like that for three years. That was sort of a heady time at the end of the 60's. Anything felt possible. It was magical." After he took his degree, New York City beckoned, and he moved to this country permanently in 1987. He serves on the faculty of Boston University, where he teaches painting. There, he was intrigued by a lecture given by a rabbi on the regenerative capacity of the burning bush.

"I did this painting about branching, and I did it in red. This bush was
like an arterial tree," he said of a 1999 oil on canvas entitled "And The
Bush Was Not Consumed" that will hang in the exhibition. According to the rabbi, Moses realized that the bush had in itself the principle of its own making. "I think it's a pretty cool thing," Mr. O'Donnell said. "There's a whole new series of work going on that has to do with music," he said, affirming the importance of rhythm in his work. Then, he recalled an experience he had with the late painter Neil Welliver that resulted in another painting that will be part of the exhibition. "I was looking at this little plant in the ground," he said of a plant he saw in Maine that, he said, had seven leaves going one way and seven leaves going another as it coiled from the ground. "'Whenever you see that stuff, it means the soil is really rich,'" he remembers Mr. Welliver telling him.

"So, I came home and made a painting inspired by vetch." Other works on exhibit take their titles from Dylan Thomas' poems from the 1930s. "The force that drives the water through the rocks," he said, quoting one line from Mr. Thomas' celebration of life, "The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower." "A Process in the Weather of the Heart," he added, citing a title from another of the Welsh poet's works.

Mr. O'Donnell also savors the Pedagogical Sketchbooks by Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940), terming them a whole research based on the study of nature. He finds the sketchbooks laced with whimsy as well. "Right there, he's my grandfather. [Modernist critic] Dore Ashton used to say, you join families in art. I look to him for some support."

"I like growth and the whole sort of branching structure wherever I find it. You find it right out the window. That's the seed that makes anything go," he said.

Mr. O'Donnell's exhibition, which will consist of roughly 30 works, will run through Aug. 5.

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