STILL LIFE
Renann Isaacs contempory art 
September 13 to October 18, 2019

John McMurtry

Congratulations Linda!

“I agree with your reclamation of realistic art, so much more to it - the shrinkage into bare lines reflects the de-lifing of the world.”

Then your invocation: "Painting unfolds in slow time. It is a meditative process wherein hand and eye and mind converge with the medium of oil paint, the mark of the brush, the sensual rendering of form, colour and texture, the delight in capturing the extraordinary world imbued in reflective objects, luminous surfaces, cast shadows and deep recesses, sumptuous tactile fabrics, delicious ripening fruit and seasonal blooms." 

Rather improves on my response.

But it is not just your eye and the object. It is the bringing to fuller life than what appears by the creative imagination imbued with and dwelling in the magic of seeing and living into all there.

… a rather larger cause is involved here that your art brings to view - seeing as indwelling revelation …

John McMurtry, FRSC is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, . Most recently, he has focused his research on the value structure of economic theory and its consequences for global civil and environmental life.

John Bentley Mays

Exhibition review: Linda O'Neill. Slow Float.

Wynick/Tuck, 401 Rickmond Street West. Toronto, 20 November 2002

Since the dawn of story and art, rivers have symbolized such vast themes as time, the span of human life, and the journey into death. In this array of new oils, however, little rivers are deployed to emblematic ends less grand, but no less engaging. We stand on the thicketed banks of streams, peer down at the whorls and eddies in the gleaming flow. The quick, detailed brushwork makes this moment unique, eternal, as though time and forward movement have been arrested, as in the fastest photograph. Or we find ourselves gazing into the summery green density, only a few steps away, from which the waters issue toward us, or toward which they disappear. Here, Courbet's famous (or notorious) L'Origine du monde (1866) is the key to what we are seeing: the portal of a woman?s body, gate of sex and exit of new life, expressed in the gentile visual language provided by our inland northern rivers.

John Bentley Mays, Sidewinder Boutique, November 2002

Susan Douglas, SOFAM, University of Guelph

Exhibition review: Linda O'Neill. Slow Float.

Wynick/Tuck, 401 Rickmond Street West. Toronto, 20 November 2002

Perhaps the most challenging endeavour that an artist can take on in today's art world is figural painting. With certain exceptions, figuration has been left behind, driven underground by more conceptual and abstract art practices. In most critical accounts of painting since the 1940's, and through Clement Greenberg's influence, it has become accepted that abstraction and formal purity are characterized by a suppression of recognizable subject matter. This opened painting up to the order of the physical presence of the painted surface, and the aspiration to paint naturalistically passed into second place.

Linda O'Neill's exhibition Slow Float reactivates a traditional, formal understanding of painting so that form becomes the subject as well as the object of the work. The paintings are about a way of seeing, but more specifically about the doubleness of vision that, formalized, becomes an image with the potential to break down the figure/ground barriers. It is evident that what absorbs O'Neill in the initial stages of painting is the problem of constructing different layers of matter and giving them solidity while simultaneously generating a convincing illusion of water and reflected sky. In some images, such as In the slow float of a different time and deep, the result is a reverse landscape of the real where the sky and the ground change places.

Painted images of landscapes are often dismissed as trite in today's art market. This is partly because they belong to the world of illustration, but also because they engage the universal language of painting - depth, movement, forms, contours and colour - which painters take for granted, thus tending to downplay the conceptually active and critical dimensions of their art. Of course realism and figuration have been equated critically with bad painting, and often rightly so. Since the 19th century, much figurative art has been getting steadily stiffer and stiffer; consequently there is the sense that only a Fischl or a Freud can come to its rescue. Accordingly, what is welcome in this body of work is the sense of potential that emerges through O'Neill's handling of the medium. There is a traditional authority about these works, a denial of the pictorial surface that permits the investigation of an inductive experiment in painting. We glimpse it through the films, barriers and optical nuances that the artist confronts and celebrates. These devices arrange the meeting between the sensual order of an event - in which mark-making is front and centre and strokes and tones predominate - and its representational form. It is almost like action painting in reverse. The upshot of O'Neill's emphasis on underlying structure is a push-pull rebuttal of simplistic attempts at mark-making. By inference, the work is a rejoinder to today's pervasive "post" post-painterly abstractionism from the side of notation and perceptual art.

REWIND, CANADIAN ART SPRING 2003

Press release 2003

Alberta Foundation for the Arts Purchases paintings from Guelph Artist

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts have recently purchased three paintings from Guelph based artist Linda O'Neill. O'Neill earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Alberta, and moved to Guelph in 1997 to complete a Master of Fine Art from the University of Guelph. Since her graduate exhibition at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in the spring of 2000, O'Neill has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Ontario and Alberta.

The Alberta Foundations criterion for purchase requires non-resident artists to maintain a strong exhibition record within Alberta, as well as representation by an Alberta gallery. O'Neill's exhibition of still life paintings Sensibilia was shown at the Thames Gallery in Chatham in 2001. This exhibition traveled to the Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery in southern Alberta, continued north to the Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, and arrived at the Vanderllelie Gallery in Edmonton for exhibition in the summer of 2002.

O'Neill's recent solo exhibition Slow Float, held at the Wynick/Tuck Gallery in Toronto, is reviewed in the current spring issue of Canadian Art Magazine by Susan Douglas. Douglas writes " ... what is welcome in this body of work is the sense of potential that emerges through O'Neill's handling of the medium. There is a traditional authority about these works, a denial of the pictorial surface that permits the investigation of an inductive experiment in painting." Susan Douglas is professor of art history and cultural theory at the University of Guelph.

As an artist, O'Neill is committed to figuration as a vehicle for personal expression, and to oil painting for its capacity to engage and seduce the eye. Her paintings, which incorporate thematic variations of still life and landscape motifs, provide the viewer with an elastic range of meaning and interpretation. O'Neill's work is represented in corporate and public collections, such as Dreco International in Edmonton and Norway, The Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph, The University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.