JOHN O'CONNELL'S current preoccupation is focused on exploring the use of fractured contemporary colour. His subject matter still remains figurative in the domain of the human form, landscape and still life. He uses gestural broad, expanses of colour are used to create a vibrant, energetic visual plane, thus unifying an entire painting . By using this expressive expanses of modulated colour he provides the viewer with a painting process that is interpretative and expressive.

Born in Derry in 1935 he studied art in the context of a B.Ed programme where practical studies dominated. Influential in his early years was the painter T.P Flanagan. His work has evolved stylistically since then as his student days were spent in the quest fro an individual style with emphasis on experimentation, drawing, movement and colour. Following in the footsteps of T.P Flanagan, the Irish landscape remains a basic theme throughout his work, and he paints in an expressionistic style where the physical act of painting and the application of colour is an all important process. Of his early work he says “my early work was influenced by the strong tradition of Irish landscape – earth colours, ochre, and greys, sky, bog, mountain mist, artists such as George Campbell, Basil Blackshaw, and T.P Flanagan.” He was influenced by the Fauves and the German Expressionists through their approach to the use of complimentary colours and also through the sheer expressiveness of colour which is central to his work. He says “I love the work of all the colourists from the Post Impressionists, the Fauves, abstract expressionists, painterly abstractionists, Nicholas de Stael, and Rothko” . Subscribing himself to the Neo Fauvist movement his states that his favourite subject matter and motifs are landscape, still life, nudes and townscapes which “act as convenient vehicles to explore and celebrate expressive colour relationships from transparent washes to rich heavy impasto” . His style is a personal statement delivered in semi abstract form through the use of a collision of rich complimentary colours, chromatic contrast and vibrant layers of impasto. He works mainly in the studio using his brushes directly alla prima in his creation of line, shape, surface dynamics, contasts and abstract mark making. He uses oil and acrylic on panel using acrylic for under painting and oil impasto to finish. The process is all important changing and adapting the composition of a work on a panel as “expression dictates”. His style is singular, expressive full of the power of raw colour. In the history of the European colourists, John O’Connell’s work and style has left his own personal footnote.