About the exhibition SUMMER OF 2020 – New work by Lois Dodd and Elizabeth O’Reilly
“Every workshop and class slipped away, but what lay before me was silver lining. Something I hadn’t had in quite a while. Time. As far as the eye could see.
As luck would have it, I was able to take spring and summer off to paint, three months of it in Cushing, Maine. Welcomed into the cocoon of a family, I want alone. Even better, I had the company of a fellow painter and dear friend.
I would wake at dawn, sometimes pre-dawn, as the lobster trucks trundled past my window. I would start they with a walk. Most says I would see some creature: a porcupine, a rafter of turkeys, a hawk, and one special day a pileated woodpecker. The quieter the road, the less they the creatures. A pandemic will quiet roads.
Easy and months passed in the studio working side by side on our separate tables and on our separate paintings, with a companionable him. I might wander in the garden, Sind some poppies, an allium, or a scabies to paint. Lois would find some dread, later stage version of something from the garden or a drawing of a figure from her sketch group to paint. Ans so time passed. It was a kind of bliss.
“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy”, said Yeats. The pandemic brought tragedy and loss to many, but a summer of painting also brought much joy. A silver lining indeed”
Elizabeth O’Reilly July 2021.
Elizabeth O’Reilly received her MFA from Brooklyn College, New York, and her 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, the Peter S. Reed Foundation and a Charles G. Shaw award in painting. A documentary on her work, “Ealaiontoir That Saile” (An Artist Abroad) was shown on Irish-language television in 2002.
