Hugh O’Neill is a modern American artist from Belfast, Ireland. He brought to America a proficient European school of painting to teach and share, infused with his unique artistic style and personality. In O’Neill’s art galleries one can experience a mix of mutually exclusive impressions: a feeling that you might had seen it somewhere, sort of déjà vu, and excitement from the unknown and mysterious --a paradox, whose friend, according to Alexander Pushkin, is a genius. As if the palettes and styles deeply engraved in our mind from the great paintings by impressionists, expressionists, and other influential art movements, have been re-emerged after the rain -- all renewed and reborn in blazing and undisturbed freshness. And everything is new - - even though there is nothing new under the sky.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The pictures must not be too picturesque." These words express very precisely the essence of Hugh O’Neill’s paintings. They are both simple and daintily elaborate, suggesting that there is always more to be revealed later as the impact of light changes everything in the twinkling of an eye.
Hugh O’Neill’s art is above and beyond mainstream and simply beautiful. It’s the luminous air that sculpts each scenery – American or Irish - and casts subtle and gentle hues. The brushwork is soft, and composes waves of images in lyrical cascades akin, if translated into music, to a spellbinding song. Time wise this art is timeless. Each painting is a complete story related the rest via a vibrant river of the sunlight, spilled on each work distinctively, and persisting in draping aura around the canvas as its uninterrupted life-force.
Mikhail Vrubel believed that nature tells us more about ourselves that we could possibly imagine. It’s not I who interprets her language, but she who explains who I really am. In a way, nature is a co-creator, natura naturans, that constantly re-creates itself and is consistent in bringing into being eternal forms of beauty. Hugh O’Neill’s vision resembles that of Vrubel, which is not a mere coincidence, but a genuinely creative perception that aligns all great artists.
“Amidst the color and tonal variations that nature provides I stand in awe...nature is the ultimate teacher and I a willing pupil...If my paintings can stir some emotion in the viewer...some genuine interest then that will be the measure of my success. The beauty and visual stimulation I experience at a scene is my sole motive for the beginning of my own creative process. I am as figurative in my work as the viewer perceives me to be and as contemporary as new grass in an old soggy field. I define modernism as a frank expression of ones self.”
Hugh O’Neill’s puts into his paintings this sweeping fullness of depiction in which it’s hard to see where the artist ends and the scenery starts being voiced in colors.
Kasimir Malevic once wrote, “With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create”. In the language of art, it’s called the talent and craft.
Hugh O’Neil graciously shared his thoughts and shed light on his aesthetic creed.
In art, craft comes before philosophy. It’s as simple as that. Even Picasso said that “there is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” Manifestos don’t paint, artists do. Technique is the only means by which a good piece of work is made, and it cannot be reversed regardless of what these so called New Age gurus coach. They try to wipe out the lines between the art and spirituality and present creativity as the universal know-how, but it’s wrong. Whoever falls for it, is trapped in wishful thinking. One should go to school. Learning does not have alternatives.
One day the artist will write a book to render his concept of art where philosophy will follow the painter's steering eye and hand. Hugh O’Neill’s galleries in Florida and other prestigious galleries nationwide stand as the sentinels of the true art, to which there is no shortcut.
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