Maura O'Connor

Maura O'Connor is a Connecticut-based artist, designer, and educator whose encaustic paintings combine hot and cold wax with oil paint to create richly layered surfaces embedded with archival prints from her own photography. Through translucent layers of wax, color, and collage, she explores memory, landscape, and the quiet rhythms of the natural world.

A lifelong connection to the outdoors informs her work. The changing light between day and night, expansive landscapes, gardens, shorelines, and the tactile experience of earth, sand, and stone become recurring visual metaphors. Whether tending a garden, planting trees, or walking through natural environments, O'Connor draws inspiration from moments of stillness and observation, translating these experiences into encaustic, oil, and mixed-media paintings that invite contemplation and reflection.

O'Connor has taught art and design in Connecticut higher education for more than 30 years, where her commitment to experiential learning has influenced generations of students. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design and Ceramics from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford and an MFA in Intermedia from Vermont College. She has also pursued extensive study in archival photography and encaustic painting through numerous workshops.

In addition to receiving multiple design awards, including the Connecticut Primary Care Association's Exemplary Community Service Award in Videography and the Public Relations Society of America's Silver Mercury Award of Excellence for Public Service Announcement, O'Connor's artwork is included in numerous private and public collections. Her large-scale two-panel encaustic painting Winter Calendar is part of the collection at Eastern Connecticut State University.

"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."