Helen O'Toole (born 1963) is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape.John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Helen O'Toole, Fellows. Retrieved 19 February 2019. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.Portland Art Museum. Contemporary Northwest Art Awards 2016, Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 2016.Sligo Art Gallery. Helen O'Toole: Paintings, Exhibition brochure. Sligo, Ireland: Sligo Art Gallery, August 1999. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum,Yood, James. "Helen O'Toole, Sazama Gallery," Artforum, December 1992. Retrieved 19 February 2019. Arts Magazine,Hixson, Kathryn. "Chicago in Review," Arts Magazine, June 1991. New Art Examiner,Moehl, Karl. "Contemporary Visual Art Invitational," New Art Examiner, April 1992. and Zyzzyva,Bigman, Alexander. "Irish Art in America: 'Amid a Space Between' at SFMOMA Artists Gallery," Zyzzyva, April 2012. Retrieved 19 February 2019. as well as the Chicago Tribune,Artner, Alan G. "Two more Chicago painters are guided by the light," Chicago Tribune, 2 December 1994. The Irish Times,Ewart, Mark. "Living Landscape," The Irish Times, August 1995. Seattle Post-Intelligencer,Hackett, Regina. Review, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 17 March 2006. and National Public Radio.Lautman, Victoria. Artistic License, National Public Radio, 19 September 1992. Art writers frequently discuss the interplay in her work between abstraction, the evocation of otherworldly light, land and space, and a commitment to investigating meaning through a painting process akin to the processes of cultivation and excavation.Teevan, Colin. "New Paintings," Exhibition brochure, Chicago: Sazama Gallery, September 1992. Artforum critic James Yood wrote, "echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paint surges toward mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit"; curator Bonnie Laing-Malcomson suggests her "richly colored monumental paintings evoke the moody landscape of her rural Irish homeland, summoning the force of J. M. W. Turner and Mark Rothko."Laing-Malcomson, Bonnie. "Curatorial Comments," Contemporary Northwest Art Awards 2016, Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 2016. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a Contemporary Northwest Art Award (both 2016), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (2013), among other awards.The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Helen O'Toole, Artists. Retrieved 19 February 2019. O'Toole lives in Seattle, Washington and is Professor of Art and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program at the University of Washington.University of Washington, School of Art + Art History + Design. Helen O'Toole, Faculty. Retrieved 19 February 2019.Kinch, Eileen. "Helen O'Toole Exhibit," Communique 6, Vol. 57, Issue 3, 2000.
Life and career O'Toole was born in County Mayo in the rural west of Ireland in 1963.Behnke Foundation. 2005 Neddy Artist Fellowship, Catalogue, Seattle, WA: Behnke Foundation, 2005. She attended the Institute of Technology, Sligo and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (BA, Painting and Drawing, 1986), where her early painting was influenced by European modernists such as Alberto Burri, Asger Jorn, and Antoni Tàpies.Robinson, Kate. "Landscapes of China. NCAD's annual exhibition," Irish Independent, June 1986.Dunne, Aidan. "Art Student vision and the restorer's art," The Irish Times, June 1986. In 1987, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, Painting, 1989); that same year she received a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1990, she was featured in "The Chicago Show" sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and began showing widely in universities and museums, and at Sazama Gallery in Chicago, which held her first solo show in 1991. In subsequent years, she has had solo exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center (1994), the Sligo Art Gallery (1999), Linenhall Arts Centre (2007) and Hamilton Gallery (2014) in Ireland, and Linda Hodges Gallery (Seattle, 2000–2013), among others. Her work has also been featured at the SFMOMA Gallery, Portland Art Museum, and Fine Arts Work Center.
O'Toole began her teaching career at La Salle College of the Arts in Singapore in 1993, where she was a lecturer until 1995; her uncle, Brother Joseph McNally, an educator and sculptor, founded the college in 1984.Ryan, Áine. " Artist honoured for evoking powerfulness of place," Mayo News, 10 May 2016. Retrieved 19 February 2019.McNally, Joseph. Wind of the Spirit: A Retrospective Exhibition of Brother Joseph McNally, an Exhibition to Commemorate the Conferment of the Meritorious Service Medal on Brother Joseph McNally for His Outstanding Achievements as an Artist, Cultural Activist and Educator, National Arts Council: Singapore Art Museum, 1998, p. 16. She returned to the United States, living in New York for a year while renting a studio in Brooklyn, before she accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle in 1996. In 2002, O'Toole gave birth to a daughter, Lydia, and accepted an Associate Professor position at UW; she was appointed Professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program in 2014. She has also taught at the university's Studio Art Program in Rome in 1999 and 2004.
Work Critical considerations of O'Toole's work have often focused on her longstanding engagement with place and landscape through abstraction. Early reviews describe her "nature-derived abstraction"Fallon, Brian. "Springboard of Irish Life," The Irish Times, February 8, 1990.Fallon, Brian. "GPA Awards," The Irish Times, October 1986. as displaying an Abstract-Expressionist "sense of natural flux";Dunne, Aidan. "Contemporary Women Artists", Irish Women Artists, From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1987, p. 69. Retrieved 19 February 2019.Dunne, Aidan. "Visionary in the Classroom," Sunday Press, June 1986. writers two and three decades later discuss her work as existing on the cusp between abstract and figurative and being rooted in observable facts that are "summoned only to dissolve."Davison, Dave R. "A quartet of evocatively murky painters muddy the wall of Kittredge Gallery," Tacoma Weekly, November 2009. Critics compare her painting to art spanning almost two centuries, suggesting qualities of both historical consciousness and contemporaneity; representative works such as Mary Larkin's Bottom (2013), for example, are often compared to those of early 19th-century painter J. M. W. TurnerMcQuaid, Salli. "Atmospheric," Artist Writer, February 1995.—known for his luminous, atmospheric and turbulent landscapes that border on abstraction—and those of 20th-century abstract artist Mark Rothko, known for monumental, contemplative color field paintings.Rumold, Danila. "Beyond The Void," Contemplative Process, February 2013. Writers also liken her work to the subjective, late landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the "dim complexity" of Albert Pinkham Ryder's seascapes, and the "pensive and brooding" landscapes of fellow West-Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats.
Despite the abstract nature of O'Toole's work—and her early attempts to dispel associations with landscape, in part, by working vertically—writers (in Ireland and elsewhere) have consistently described her work as "distilling the essence"Ó Cuív, Ruairí. "Helen O'Toole Exhibition at Art Gallery," Sligo Champion, August 1999. of the experiences, history, and terrain of her native region.Rumold, Danila. "Amid a Space Between," Contemplative Process, March 2012. Salli McQuaid characterized her work as moody and intense with an "undercurrent of dark passion and superstition" common to Irish culture; Bonnie Laing-Malcomson writes that O'Toole "channels the deep-seated pain and misery of the past […] into such beauty that it elicits a sense of redemption." Author Colin Teevan suggests that she invokes, by suggestion and technique, the rich textures and starkly contrasting colors of a "barren, craggy land, battered by wind and rain and overshadowed by an everchanging sky."
Critics note, however, that O'Toole realizes those qualities less by an engagement with observed reality or specific narrative than through the potentialities of paint, worked in a manner that Chicago Tribune reviewer Alan Artner identified as a "kind of spiritual quest" similar to that of early abstract modernists. Others have described her process as a never-resolved battle or, in Arts Magazine critic Kathryn Hixson's words, an attempt at "approaching the sublime—another world—through personal struggle with materials capable of, but resisting, being controlled." In early works, such as Pungence (1991)Helen O'Toole. Pungence, Paintings 1990–1999, Official website. Retrieved 19 February 2019. and Pagan Pilgrimage (1992), O'Toole created atmospheric expanses and pictorial incident through washes, drips, spills, gesture and texture. Some early reviewers suggested the level of painterly incident could have been pared down;McCrum, Sean. "Graduating with Honours," Sunday Tribune, June 1986.McCracken, David. "Gallery Scene," Chicago Tribune, 5 April. 1991. others, such as James Yood, affirmed what he termed the "seething ebb and flow of the forces of color" and precarious, "nervous balance of pictorial forces." In the late 1990s, O'Toole turned to a more deliberative process of working wet-on-wet layers of paint that she scraped and scumbled (e.g., Mustard Field, 2000)—often over several years—in a manner sometimes compared to the measured work of farming. O'Toole herself has said, "The paintings are built slowly, made in layers, with a similar measure to working the soil, revealing the strata of the bog, negotiating clumsy, crusty limestone fields at a deliberate pace."Portland Art Museum. "CNAA Artist Feature: Helen O'Toole,". Retrieved 6 March 2019.
O'Toole's handling of light, color and paint achieves what critics often call an "elliptical" quality in her work, a ruminative cycle that viewers are drawn into, moving from hazy, shifting layers, minimal forms and murky, muted passages of color to painterly surface texture to the compositions as a whole, and back.Hunter-Larsen, Jessica, "Curatorial Comments," Contemporary Northwest Art Awards 2016, Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 2016. Combined with the enveloping, monumental scale of much of the work, the spatial ambiguity of paintings such as Mary Larkin's Bottom (2013), To Remember (2015),Helen O'Toole. To Remember, Large Paintings 2013–2018, Official website. Retrieved 19 February 2019. or Gan Ainm (2016–8) enables viewers to enter into what some have called a "meteorological-psychological space" in which they may perceive encoded emotions, implied metaphors and layered allusions to place, history and legend.