Maura O'Connor

I love to listen to the sounds of the natural landscape and watch the rhythms of day turning into night. Whether at home or traveling, my art is inspired by the enduring spirit and grit of the landscape around me.

Formational experiences of outdoor living have translated into my art practice today, evident in the choice of encaustic medium which allows the building up of surfaces, layer upon layer and texture upon texture with embedded objects. The varied surface of collaged paintings incorporates a love of mark making, language and symbols– a history or narrative within the frame. Surfaces that look worn or weathered with layers of patina or erosion are analogous to the changes of life, the way we build our lives, searching for meaning, to suffer a loss in death or divorce, similar to a peeling away, just as paint can be scraped away, revealing another surface beneath and the hidden history of beauty, pain and struggle.

Visits to Spain, Italy, Scotland and the American Southwest have all had tremendous impact on my work, contributing new stories, fragments of color, shape, texture and mark making. I use digital photography to record the landscape and archival printing methods to create images that can be collaged into the encaustic paintings. Archival prints are embedded along with powdered pigments, charcoal, graphite, pastels, stone dust and oils to bring detail and texture to the surface. I like to create a sense of impermanence or an abruptly changing landscape. Certain pictorial elements often recur, such as the depiction of architectural spaces, rock formations and mountain or desert landscapes featuring symbolic or archetypal meaning.