Robyn O'Neil: Something Vanished Over Paradise

Celebrating Robyn O'Neil's twenty years of drawing, the works in this exhibition represent those two decades with large-scale graphite drawings and collages accented with pops of color.

O'Neil's large-scale drawings envelop viewers, placing them among thousands of minuscule people and vast surroundings. She invites us into these fantastical worlds, holding our attention even when it is uncomfortable to look. In these works in the exhibition, O'Neil uses a .5 mechanical pencil, a tiny point, to capture immense and foreboding landscapes and the figures that inhabit them.

The most potent example is reminiscent of the work of the 15th Century painter Hieronymus Bosch. The largest and most complex drawing in the exhibition, the triptych Hell, measures fourteen feet long and holds 65,000 figures. O'Neil provides a cautionary tale depicting hell as humans struggling against a menacing environment and cruelly destroying one another.

In her collages, the figures have vanished, and the landscapes are rendered through depths of material and oil pastels. O'Neil acknowledges the influence of modernists Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe in these works. Through this change in media and practice, she is creating new worlds, rather than the apocalyptic ones seen in her earlier drawings.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website