It’s a strange winter in the Berkshires, defined not so much by a single season but by the confusion of seasons: winter comes and goes in angry droves while spring dots the weeks in odd, muddy bursts, leaving us cold, snow-slapped, gray and bitter, without the vast, total emptiness that makes winter so special. Winter is the time of hibernation, of huddling to drive off nature’s dead sleep as the world outdoors, comprised of negatives — cold and unyielding —ferments its energies. Since the new year Tom has captured the fascinating, brutal dual nature of winter and harnessed it to the benefit of his craft.

When I met Tom last fall he described his recent series as seasonal, and I noticed the autumn colors and nodded and set the thought aside; his latest, however, is elemental: on grand, spare canvases he divides sparse subjects with gaping swaths of pulsing negative space, rendered in chalky whites and dense, rough-hewn blacks. What subjects do appear — through labyrinthine line-work or distant possibilities of shapes or once, iconically, the abstraction of a snowshoe — are charged with elegant desperation, and we cling to them like lonely lights guiding us through a blizzard. The work balances the beauties and dangers of such austere landscapes and serve as reminders of how little we control of our environment.
More than representation, however, Tom’s work benefits from the solemnity of the season. This is work that’s been given time and focus, and much as nature ferments this work ferments; the first blush of snow-white has become a rich, ponderous black. His canvases have built layers upon layers, building up a system caught underneath the topmost layer of paint and filled with patient electricity. Nature does not give itself up so easily in these months, and demands our patience. For an artist this close to his environment, patience allows truth to emerge, truth which speaks to the endless silence of snow and the endless space of darkness. Tom’s in communion with the season, and his work has the purity that only Winter can provide: when all is silent, Life’s details, its moments of being (all respect to Virginia Woolf) are made distinct. Tom’s captured these distinctions and rendered them through his aesthetic. The work speaks to the immensity of nature and our insignificance. They speak to the relationships we have with our world, the relationships we often forget. There’s power in them. It’s humbling.

36 X 48″ Oil/Canvas

36 X 36″ Oil/Canvas

24 X 36 Oil/ Canvas

Tom O’Neil does not follow expectations when he starts a painting. He approaches the canvas with an open mind ready to “pay attention to an impulse.” It seems impossible: forming cohesion by following whims, yet this struggle is not only the context but the content of his work. Each mark, then, is not a statement but a suggestion, a (re)mark. “Most of the time,” he says, “I’m making marks and crossing them out. When my cross-outs become the subject, when they become interesting, that’s when I’m onto something.” He creates a dialogue between himself and the painting by making a statement, waiting for the paint to question it, and responding. In this way he finds each painting’s character, and ultimately its purpose. A painting is complete when it’s no longer asking him “what if?”

The results speak for themselves: airtight layers that unravel in front of a patient eye; colors that swarm and bleed into one another, creating two-dimensional landscapes that seem to recede infinitely, images that seem to tell stories or ask the viewer to invent their own. His aesthetic is the the formal result of a debate between the authority of his intention and the unapologetic power of chance. This is symbolic of his mistrust in decisions and his immense appreciation for the open nature of questions; he’s quick to note that he does not have answers and is dubious of any artist that claims to (yet he’s even more wary of artists that do not ask any questions at all). At the core of Tom’s artistic and personal philosophy is the knowledge that Life is not about answers, that any question really worth asking does not have an answer but must to be asked anyway. So he keeps asking questions, and we get to enjoy the fruits of these explorations.

2728 oil/ canvas 66 x 66″

“Metaphysically, a thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought,” writes Hans Hoffman, in his essay “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts.” This is an elaboration of his ‘Push-Pull’ color theory, which argues that the interplay between warm and cool colors creates depth and movement (in the context of Tom O’Neil’s work ‘colors’ can be seen as any element, any decision, made on the canvas). Hoffman is concerned with the interrelation between the decisions made on the picture plane and the effect these decisions make on the resolution of the piece. O’Neil follows this school of thought, producing work based on the serendipitous conjunction of improvisational elements; his work is a process of discovering this serendipity.

Hoffman’s theory focuses on the benefits of conflict within the concerns of the picture plane but his point is universal: life and death, subject and object, love and hate, creation and destruction — at all moments we exist within dualities, defined by our relationship to the innumerable decisions (and non-decisions) that comprise existence. O’Neil’s paintings are the results of his struggle with these dualities. Every time we meet, Tom introduces me to another perspective on his dueling considerations, ideas on art and existence he’s been wrestling with for years and which, he admits, have no sure answers, a statement he makes proudly — he relishes his work’s ability to comment without presenting a conclusion. He encourages these oppositional elements to bicker and brawl, circling them again and again until he finds that magical point where the elements are at peace and the painting can rest. 

As this experiment continues I’ll explore these opposing forces in detail, starting from the ground up with the daily battle between his intentions for a piece and the near-gleeful ways he thwarts them. It’s grand territory to explore and, true to the search, there may be no sure answers but, as Tom says, “trust the process, not the destination.”

Louise Fishman 2012 70″ x 60″ oil on linen

by Roland Obedin-Schwartz

It’s a warm October afternoon and I’ve hoofed it down to the spartan Cheim & Read Gallery to see recent work by the abstract painter Louise Fishman. In typical Chelsea fashion I’m greeted with a roundabout of white walls and a pair of gallery assistants huddled behind a desk that looms nearly a foot over their heads, hiding all but a pair of black-haired buoys batting idle gossip. Stifling silence follows me throughout.

There are about a dozen paintings up on the walls, each a flurry of massive brushstrokes. Her work is chaotic, boldly expressive, and physical: the paint rises in flakes and dunes out of the canvas, obscuring the two-dimensionality of the plane, and you can see her brushwork, its intense labor. It’s furiously anti-representational, and its physicality has the impression of tangible mania — a shouting match between artist and canvas. Each piece is an insistent declaration of the picture plane: bare scraps of canvas, litterings of paint embolus, and dripping trails of chemical removers enforce the aggressive, maximalist madness the paintings impart. I imagine Fishman chewing out canvas after canvas in an orgiastic rush; I imagine Tom finds this sense of abandon alluring.

Charles Thomas O’Neil 2012 11″ x 14″ oil on panel

I’m here on his suggestion. Rather, I’m here pursuing his opinion; off the cuff, Tom flips open a magazine to a glossy Fishman reproduction: “She’s having too much fun doing what she’s not supposed to do. I love that.” On the page, her work doesn’t leave much of an impression; it’s the type of work anti-abstractionists pull their hair out over. To Tom, however, it presents a challenge, a thrown gauntlet. “I love artists that make me question, because it makes me want to paint. It’s an audacious show. It made me want to run back to the studio and experiment.”

Charles Thomas O’Neil 2012 66″ x 66″ oil on canvas

So I’m here in Chelsea examining her furious canvases, and the more time I spend overwhelmed by Fishman’s work the more I begin to feel as though the two artists differ not so much in goals but in temperament, defined by the distinct sense of time one reads on their paintings. Every piece at the Cheim & Read show seems to capture a single moment of expression, torn from her consciousness to the canvas as fast as the thoughts could translate. She made the work following a trip to Venice and its grand drama and shimmering blues explode onto us as if we are suddenly inside a montage of sensations, experiencing the moments within her during her journey. I’m reminded of the automatic writing experiments made popular by the Dadaists, where one set out words without attempting to corral what appears on the page.

Charles Thomas O”Neil 10″ x 10″ oil on copper

O’Neil, in comparison, seems to write his paintings through endless deletions and revisions, inching along until it’s done. His work extends great swathes of time, containing the history of his minute diversions, exhaustive wringing of the picture plane to determine, exactly, what it is the final image needs. At their core I imagine Fishman and O’Neil work similarly yet she seems able to produce paintings in an instant, and I think this is the freedom Tom finds so compelling; yet, it is precisely the time devoted to each painting, the uncontrollable need to keep revising and reconstituting the visual materials, that makes his work special.

Before leaving Cheim & Read I take note of how demanding the experience has been, and then I step out into the sun and am liberated. Inside I felt overwhelmed by a subservience to the work towering over me. I do not feel that when I’m in Tom’s studio. His paintings invite a playful observation, and ask that we spend some time with them to find out how deeply they may pull us. Fishman’s show is strong, her work impressive, but they are not personal to me. I thrill at O’Neil’s work because I feel as though I can be a part of them, as though the layers of time are long enough to let us in on the experience.

by Roland Obedin-Schwartz

9/15/12

I’ve been mulling over the strange experience of watching Tom O’Neil paint. I arrive at the studio and find him hard at work on a piece I’ve never seen before, a square canvas hanging where there used to be a painting of, as best I can describe, two melting musical notes. The new painting is a roiling dervish of green and white scratches and scraps of black layered in an angry jumble. “New piece?” I ask.

9/20/12

He shakes his head. “Nope. Same as last week.” I get close and make my way through its

10/01/12

10/10/12

dense layerings; lo and behold, the dripping notes are still there, jigsawed under cream-colored geometry. As we chat he continues to paint. A brush loaded with inky black scores out a winding tube — a snake, perhaps — that transforms the whole image. He steps back to take in the whole, then scuffs at the snake with a dirty rag. In another few strokes the snake is a twig, which he rips away, the remains forming what I describe as a pudding. I’m afraid to blink and miss the next move. Using an oily paint pen he draws stamen and petals and makes a flower, then pulls the petals and finds a crown. “Do I finish the crown, which it seems to want, or do I keep it as is?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond but proceeds with the crown, then sighs; it doesn’t work. He smears it out, gives it legs and a base, and before it can sit — it’s a cup, I think — he’s demolished the sides and reduced the form to a pair of ovals, parallel shapes floating in a stew of scoured black ink and the palimpsests of countless other shapes before it.

I come back a week later, and the painting is gone. In its place is a another work, a multi-colored rectangle on a gray sea made of millions of colors, but when I look closely, stepping through the layers, there lies the ghost-remainder of two melting musical notes. I cannot even imagine what it will be next.

10/20/12 …….. still not at peace, this canvas has been cookin in various iterations since @1998. 66×66″ oil/canvas .

by Roland Obedin-Schwartz
My name is Roland Obedin-Schwartz and my job on this site is to produce a series of mini-essays: conversational encounters with
Tom O’Neil, his approach, and his art. I met Tom serendipitously, the result of an idea on the part of his web host, Bob O’Haver, to experiment with a new tack on the writing for Tom’s site. Bob and I have known each other about a year from the context of my work as a budding fiction writer — a storyteller, not a journalist, nor a press agent. It is for this reason that I am here. My skill lies not in churning copy but in crafting a story; my goal is to give the reader a new opportunity to explore Tom O’Neil’s process as it opens up before me.

While I am comfortable in the fine art world I am by no means an expert in painting, much less abstract painting, and while I have been hired for this job I am intent to provide my own perspective on O’Neil and his work. Tom has graciously let me into his studio, and he and I have begun a series of meetings; I watch him paint, I listen to his musings, and we discuss his artistic purview. Our hope is that I become an informed advocate for a process and product that, in my opinion, is not currently given its due. I plan to approach these essays similarly to how O’Neil approaches a canvas — with goals in mind but a determined willingness to follow the search where it wants to go. I will not shy from contradiction, and I seek to enrich the discussion of O’Neil’s work but do not aim to provide answers for it. These conversations will not follow a straight line, and are not moving towards a specific end-point. They are guideposts through an intellectual adventure, and fodder for debate. Think of me as a telescope, here to bring out a new perspective in what’s already there.