Lucienne O'Mara

Artist of the Day 2024

LUCIENNE O'MARA
selected by Liliane Tomasko

Lucienne O'Mara (b 1989) received her BA in Fine Art Painting and MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School. Currently in her final year of the Turps Banana Studio Programme, she works predominantly in oil on large abstract paintings formatted from a linear structure of the grid. Movement is integral to these boldly geometric paintings, created with the splattering of paint and the physicality of the brushstroke. O'Mara's work aims to traverse the confines of colour, rhythm and space.  

My paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid. The freehand geometry attempts to discipline and battle against the emotion and movement brought by the use of colour, and the physicality of the brushwork. The limitless potential of this single compositional method allows me to explore the boundaries of colour, rhythm, and space. My engagement with the repetition of squares within squares is seeking to break down visual order and imbue it with a kind of chaos and poetry more akin to our experience of life.
- Lucienne O'Mara 

Lucienne O'Mara is a brave painter, whose unabashed sense of color and expressive brushstrokes not only collide but often amalgamate with the loosely painted structure she puts in place on her surfaces. The grid, which consists of a conglomerate of individual rectangles or squares, is often rendered in shades of the same color and similar temperature. Placed within each unit we see quasi-geometric forms, painted with wide brushes that merge colors, wet in wet, and freeze the gesture of that moment forever. They pulsate and hover, emitting the light of an action now past, crystalizing the thought and feeling which prompted it within its delicate membrane. 

In her paintings we find echoes of Kandinsky, Albers, Hodgkin and Sean Scully. O'Mara takes the structure of the grid, thaws its confining quality by assaulting it with an emotional force that turns the painting into something sensual, and animate.
- Liliane Tomasko