Tom O’Neil shares paintings by BCD students, Open Studios 2015
Last year, we accomplished the goal “to build an expanded, more flexible arts curriculum that more deliberately integrates BCD’s program with fine and performing arts resources available throughout our region and community.” More here.
In this post, I am proud and pleased to feature current BCD parent (’15 and ’20), BCD Trustee, and nationally-recognized artist Tom O’Neil, who is once again volunteering as a teacher in our Upper School Arts Block electives program this year. Tom has shown his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions, and he has been included in numerous arts publications. He received a B.S. in Fine Art and Art History from Skidmore College, has studied at Rhode Island School of Design, and has been working in his Stockbridge studio since moving to the Berkshires in 2002.
Teaching his US Arts Block class, 2015
In Tom’s “Introduction to Painting” class this spring, students will explore some of the fundamental aspects around oil painting and the reasons we make art in general. Starting with a raw wooden panel support, they will learn how to prepare the surface. Working with line, tone, value, color and texture, they will endeavor to understand the journey into their creations. Tom’s desire as their teacher is “to show each student how our expressions change through a process and how we learn from this exciting endeavor called art.”
Tom O’Neil, untitled #2655
“O’Neil works in a manner akin to “stream of consciousness”: a fluid process reminiscent of the push-and-pull strategies of Hans Hoffmann paintings. Abstract forms and markings evolve and ultimately emerge into exquisite and unique compositions. In this organic process, the artist finds his forms through trial and error—in his words, a “survival of the fittest.” In this way the viewer is exposed to the “history” of the painting-privy to artistic decisions typically made alone in the studio.
Tom in his studio in Stockbridge, MA
O’Neil’s work focuses on the fundamental relationships between figure and ground. Reflections of light on the painted surfaces reveal complex veils of color which complicate the rigorous geometric underpinnings of his compositions. The completed painting is always the result of finding a balance between unity and confusion, the static and the dynamic.” (Louis Grachos, Executive Director, AMOA-Arthouse, Austin, from the preface of the book Charles Thomas O’Neil – Recent Work 2009–2013).
BCD student painting, 2015
New Show: HOWARD SCOTT GALLERY Opening in April 2016 (TBA)
Tom O’Neil, untitled #2603