committed on-site painter, my most recent body of paintings and collages are based on the Gowanus Canal area of Brooklyn, the North Fork of Long Island, North Carolina and Vermont. What unites the work is the juxtaposition of the natural and the man-made in the landscape, and the effects of light, either natural or artificial, on them.

The physical challenges and demands of painting en plein air are very much the draw for me, and as Mario Naves states, “Elizabeth O’Reilly proves herself the envy of anyone who’s ever been flummoxed by oil paint. In her small works on panel, the famously difficult medium is rendered curt and supple.” I continue to be challenged by night painting both along the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn and in Vermont, trying hard to understand and convey what artificial light does as it emanates from windows or a street-light to throw just a touch of illumination onto a landscape of subtle, dark, value shifts. The North Fork of Long Island has provided much new material in the way of single, brightly-colored man-made structures set in a natural landscape, dappled by sunlight and the shadows of trees. Strong sunlight brings flickering shadows of trees and foliage across the sides of a teal-colored shed or a yellow and white trailer on the side of the road. Trips to North Carolina have yielded similar types of motifs with a double road carved into the side of a mountain, one heading up the mountain and the other down, with the shadows of winter trees moving horizontally across the roadway. The bridge of a railroad track in North Carolina arcs above a mint green roadway, casting a dark and intricate shadow below. The structure is strikingly similar to the Gowanus Expressway as it looms above the Brooklyn roads.

Simplicity has always been a goal, to pare things down to an essence; to eliminate detail in pursuit of a more abstract arrangement of shapes. A renewed interest both in watercolor and collage has yielded a new body of work. My oil paintings provided the starting point to create collages using painted watercolor paper simply cut with a box-cutter and pasted down. The process demands simplification and emphasizes geometry, color and composition. Cityscapes are fundamentally complex, whilst the collage process begs for simplicity. Together they allowed me to make a series of collages that have been fun to make.

Elizabeth O’Reilly received her MFA from Brooklyn College, New York, and her B.Ed from the National University of Ireland. She has participated in residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation, Ireland, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming and the Ragdale Foundation, Illinois, and has received a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. A documentary on her work was shown on the Irish TV network, TG4 in 2002.