MOIRA CONNELLY: Thresholds 2019-2021

Moira Connelly is an American painter living and working in Los Angeles. She works predominantly in oil and acrylic, though drawing is an integral part of the preparatory process. All of her compositions begin their life as paper studies. Moira's paintings explore a space between image making and abstraction, based on the constant monitoring of her environment. The preliminary drawings are inspired from these observations which become the architecture and jumping off point for the paintings. 

From there starts the painting process. Her works are a symbiosis between colour and the layering of paint lines. Though they start figurative, the works slowly move towards abstraction as the painting becomes more heavily worked on. Moira's work retain recognisable elements that anchor the work, exporing a space between real and psychic spaces.

"I am interested in how we move through the world and interact with concrete things, experiences, elements, objects, and how our perception and experience of those creates another space for exploration and understanding of existence."

 “Orange brick” was made primarily in 2019 and finished in early 2020. In this painting you can really see through the architecture of drawing that is forming the structure of the painting. It’s a painting that plays with the idea of animation, with space, with movement. I titled the painting orange brick based on motifs within the painting, thinking about architecture from where I’m from in the midwest, and then also thinking about what it means, the image of throwing a brick through a window."

"Summer Night is very much an experience of heat and temperature in Los Angeles. It’s a kind of meditation on moving through the city. The gridlines that, again, form the architecture of the work, are a reference to scaffolding and the colour is very much based on light and temperature in California. In this painting there’s also a cobweb which has been a recurring motif in my work, the cobweb is a riff on the grid, as well as an intuitive drawing element that I’ve brought into my work in different reiterations."

"Morning is based on an experience of the pandemic, of really strict routines, a change in the experience of time. The image, the structure of Morning, is based on a still life of a bowl on a table. A classic motif shown through marks and lines, and throuhg the use of colour, the image becomes distorted."

 

"Pane also explores the motif of the grid. In this work I was thinking about a window space. I was also looking at illuminated manuscripts and how framing and decorative elements functioned within those manuscripts and I was playing with pulling these elements into this work."

"I hope that when people look at my work they feel and experience something that is both familiar and strange. Working from everyday images, whether that be a fence, a spiderweb on scaffolding, a bowl on a table, I’m working from daily experiences and sort of mundane observations. Through the process and intention of painting, the act, I’m trying to transform those images into an experience, into something that’s possibly larger than the thing itself and sort of gives the ordinary a sort of profundity and an ability for us to imagine it as something else. Something more fantastical, but also which has greater potential."