Brilliant colors and textured surfaces captivate the viewers of art professor Mary Lovelace O'Neal's paintings. Sometimes, though, the titles of her paintings demand as much attention as the large-scale works themselves. Those titles -- such as Running Freed More Slaves Than Lincoln Ever Did, Willie Jackson Stuffed Her in the Closet and Left, and Racism Is Like Rain -- sharpen the political edge to O'Neal's provocative art, which is inspired by a personal history that took her from Jackson, Mississippi, to study art in cities around the globe.
An acclaimed painter and printmaker whose work has been exhibited internationally, O'Neal is a strong advocate for the arts and one reason why the visual arts are flourishing on campus. She currently chairs the Department of Art Practice. In recent years her commitment to the department and its students has strengthened the department and its connections to the university at large.
O'Neal says the Consortium for the Arts is continuing to fortify the role of art practice on campus by encouraging new initiatives and partnerships. In just the past year, she notes, the Department of Art Practice launched the Center for Digital Art and New Media Research; joined a number of other departments and campus centers to co-sponsor a prominent Indian artist in residence; and explored ways to share teaching resources with the program in film studies. "We're expanding our offerings, and this whole attitude that encourages synergy is working well for us," she says.
"Some
people
don't
understand the
level of discipline
involved with
bringing a painting
or an object into
being.
It's a discipline
as rigorous
as any area
of research."
Mary Lovelace O'Neal
O'Neal, who attracts students from an array of majors such as environmental design, engineering, rhetoric, and film studies, believes her students enroll in art-making classes because they recognize that the visual arts can enhance any field of study. "It teaches students about how they are tied to a tradition of making, and educates them to use another part of the brain -- the part that enables them to visualize an idea and then give that thought or concept a concrete manifestation, be it a sculpture, video, or painting," she says. "Some people don't understand the level of discipline involved with bringing a painting or an object into being. It's a discipline as rigorous as any area of research."
O'Neal brings her paintings into being through a creative process similar to that identified with the action painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. "For me, painting really is like an aerobic activity," she says, "because it involves my whole body. It's a total physical and mental immersion into the process." Her vigorous brush strokes and dramatic use of pigments produce splashes of colors and abstract images whose complexity cannot be overstated. Her canvases, when done, communicate narratives and feelings that range from strength and fertility to vulnerability and loss.
For example, her 7-by-5-foot painting Angel of the Hood features a figure that looks like a deep red torso, head cast downward, with long, dripping lines of multi-hued paint streaming down its front. A splash of aquamarine, topped by a tempest of white circular strokes, stands next to the reddish figure, while a few thinner black lines echo the larger forms by rippling through a background of earth tones. O'Neal says the painting was inspired by a series of killings that took place in East Oakland in the early 1990s. "It seemed for a time that kids were simply being wiped out. No one was paying the kind of attention that that particular neighborhood needed, and I was angry about it," she recalls.
Detail from
Running
Freed More
Slaves Than
Lincoln Ever
Did, mixed
media on
canvas.
See reference page
O'Neal, who is African American, became actively involved with the civil rights movement as a student, and that involvement has been an ongoing source of inspiration for her work. Her art resonates with memories from her childhood in the Jackson-Tougaloo area of Mississippi, and from her years of studying art at Howard University and Columbia University, where she earned her M.F.A. in 1969.
More recently, she won the 1993 Artist en France award from the French government, which allowed her to live and work in Paris for a year. Images and stories from France and elsewhere in Europe, as well as from travels in Africa and South America, figure prominently in her work.
"A story gets me to the canvas and allows me not to be afraid of its blank expanse," she says. "The story may be as intangible as a smell remembered, a series of dreamed color changes, the geometry of a bridge, or the patterns formed by leaves on a tree. I try to extract the drama from the story or memory and the drama from the paint and put it there."
O'Neal endeavors to help students develop a similar process for envisioning and expressing their stories. "I want to find ways to help them clarify what's going on in their lives, and what kinds of connections they can make with others in society," she says. "Artists are always pushing how we think and deal with each other to the edge -- pushing and moving the culture forward."