Born St. Andrews, Roanne O’Donnell is an award-winning Scottish painter currently working on the series, ‘Surface Work’. She studied Drawing and Painting at the prestigious Edinburgh College of Art and went on to obtain a Masters in Contemporary European Fine Art in Barcelona. After 18 years of professional practice in Northern Norway, she now has her studios in Andalucia and Fife, Scotland.
The subject of her work is the process of making it, inextricably linked to the concepts and actions of limitation, restriction and repetition. O’Donnell limits her materials to ivory black pigment, graphite, and charcoal, using cold wax and oil as binders on paper. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and collected by such as The Scottish Office, North Norwegian Museum of Art and private collectors. Recent exhibitions include FAB 2020 Contemporary Art Festival, with Outside The Form and UFOFABRIK, Italy, as a finalist in The Verona Art Prize. This year she has been interviewed in contemporary art magazines, ART Habens Review, Reset Fine Art and Art Reveal Magazine. Her work will be shown with Rossacinabro Gallery Rome in Autumn 2020 and she has been invited to the XIIIth Florence Biennale in 2021. Parallel with her own art practice O’Donnell is a curator and from 2012-16 was Director of the Gallery of Northern Norway, collaborating with the National Museum of Art in Oslo, curating and exhibiting work by Paul McCarthy, Norway 10 Designers and established international and emerging artists.
Self-taught or art school?
Art Schools. I studied in the ’80s at Edinburgh College of Art, one of the most conservative schools in the UK. It was modelled after The École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, entrenched in the figurative ‘hierarchy of the genres’. Our humanities syllabus was chapter by chapter, taken from Gombrich’s “The Story of Art” and stopped with “The Triumph of Modernism”. Contemporary art was disregarded, so I was sceptical of it and more ashamedly, ignorant of it. So In ‘96 I studied for a Masters in European Contemporary Fine Art in Barcelona, discovered a great deal through peer discourse and learned to contextualise my practice.
I moved to Norway in 1999 and parallel to my studio practice lectured in art history, theory and drawing and painting at Nordland kunst- og filmfagskole. Ultimately I became the Director of the North Norwegian Gallery of Art, Galleri Nord-Norge, in Harstad, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where I spent eighteen years. As a curator, it has very rewarding to bring contemporary and historical art to the public, as well as give exposure to many established and emerging artists. I think my art education served me well.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
“Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe” by Albrecht Dürer. A pivotal work for artists.
How would you describe your style?
There are some Minimalist principles in the making but it really falls within Post-Minimalist related categories by way of the organic materials I use and that it is obviously hand made. It is abstract due to the lack of reference other than the process of making it and the resulting surface. So to call it process painting is the most literal description, although that term confuses it with Process Art or spontaneous painting, which it’s not.
Is narrative important within your work?
The subject and story lie in the making of the work; the process, limitation, repetition and restriction. So if a viewer reads and understands it as I intend, depends on their fluency in art as language. Finding references and making comparisons is what we use to contextualise art and for some, it’s a key to building a personal relationship with it. We can all find meaning which does or doesn’t exist. We are free to speculate, interpret and let our imagination take us in any direction, but it’s not important to me what someone might read, invent or perceive in my work. Because I refer to the latest body as a gift or a homage to mining, people are triggered to find references to mining and, although I have respect for an individual’s interpretation, it doesn’t interest me. Is that rude?
What matters to me is how a person reacts to the surface physiologically and emotionally. It’s fascinating. The greatest challenge is in my limited opportunity to watch the viewers’ reactions to the art. Not being together with them in a space, not seeing their face or body language when they interact with it, I miss their response. One collector told me his painting makes him calm. Another, at an opening, that a piece was looming over him and he had to find a place in the gallery where it couldn’t watch him. Someone else had to leave an exhibition soon after arriving as the work made her eyes hurt. Due to the multitude of lines, at a distance, it’s possible to experience a disturbance, almost a sensation of movement. Or, if the lines are more tonally unified it can appear to be flat and still. Only as you move closer does the surface become apparent.
I have a challenge in reconciling myself to the viewer seeing the work online or in print; to its dilution and the loss which is inevitable in separating it from a physical space and an intimate experience. The works don’t translate well digitally and are difficult to photograph in their entirety, so I have to represent or illustrate the surface with accompanying detail shots. The viewer cannot experience the whole. We lose something in the distance created with reproduction and gain something in the accessibility. This dichotomy has existed since the very first print of artwork was made. I would think it a challenge for most artists, most art and most viewers, even if the narrative is obvious.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
I lean towards artists and writers, who apart from creating what I think is beautiful work, give me the sensation that the tempo and rhythm of their creative process is especially slow in the preparation and execution. Both Richard Serra and Chillida are among them. I find Serra’s work aesthetically exquisite and his messages unmistakable. It puts me on edge and makes me anxious, which is what he intends. I walked through his “The Matter of Time” installation at the Bilbao Guggenheim and experienced a strange dichotomy of trust and trepidation, so he raised some serious questions for me about physics and faith.
Eduardo Chillida. His alabaster sculptures are ethereal, with the delicate play of light, and powerful in the solidity of their material and structure. In their profundity, his writing and philosophical reflections make me cry.
What or who inspires your art?
Repetition and infinite possibilities for the work inspires me. Knowing that nothing can be duplicated, working on and on, one work leading to another. These tiny similarities and differences are what unrelentingly drive me. During the making, I have an immediate aesthetic response to each mark or series of marks and take only seconds in deciding to keep or re-make. I look at the form, impasto fat or translucent lean. This response is as basic as a like or dislike for the mark’s value and its relationship to those made before and besides. If I make a mark I’m unhappy with I scrape it away and re-make it. When I work my face can be as close as a few centimetres from the surface, observing and absorbing each mark as it is made, lifting my eyes to enjoy the emptiness in front or re-assess the marks behind. It’s a captivating process.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
I live mainly in Spain, but am I’m working in my studio in Scotland at the moment. It was my father’s workshop. He turned and carved wood, making everything from carved primitive sculptural figures to engraved boxes ceremonial staffs decorated with personal symbols of the people he made them for. The space has raw brick walls, cement floor, wooden rafters, carpentry equipment and machinery standing around, bowls and tin boxes full of screws, rusted tools and technical instruments. I have made an installation of the oldest tools on one wall. The dark auburn of the metal and the patina of the wooden handles against the brick is beautiful.
I can’t work cleanly, so it’s a mess and looks chaotic, but I know where every tiny stick of charcoal is. I used to go in with the best intention of working cleanly, but it’s not possible, so I gave up long ago. Clothes, hands, face, hair … filthy with graphite, oil and wax. I went to a store straight from my studio once and a woman told her little girl not to stand too close to the tramp lady! In Scots, I’m what’s called a “clert”. I also have a dry room where I take the completed work to hang and rest, which, when I am ready to, I wrap in conservation paper and place in their own individual flat boxes. It is pristine. Everything is speckless (including me and my hands) and my handling of the work is very careful and delicate; a stark contrast to the brutality I sometimes subject my work to during its making.
Do you have any studio rituals?
Not particularly, but when I’m struggling with a surface, it’s not responding as I want, and I know I can’t take it any further, I take time to think about why. Sometimes, before storing it, I sit down and, as I don’t smoke, I roll a piece of paper into the shape of a short cigarette and leaning my elbows on my knees, and staring into space, I pretend to smoke it; the way my gran used to do when she was watching the wrestling on the telly.
What are you working on currently?
I’m making three more pieces for the SURFACE WORK painting series, which are each three metres thirty centimetres in length and one hundred and twenty-two centimetres wide. It’s a fascinating process as the challenges lie in my physical ability to bend over for lengthy periods of time and maintaining the continuity of the surface. My creative process is calculated and my studio practice is mechanical and I systematically work on one surface, on one layer in one sitting, irrespective of scale, as I want consistency. So many factors dictate the fluidity that to rest for more than a short length of time breaks continuity and the image is split into obvious sections, which destroys the overall pitch. A pause for even a few minutes can affect the painting due to factors such as the rhythm of my gesture, the speed of my movement; if I’m aggressive or gentle, if I use heavy or light pressure, how I stand, the angle of my arm. If the shift in these factors is too abrupt, it shows.
Over the past twenty years, I have consistently made frottage and in the SURFACE WORK Series, there is a limited sub-project of sixty frottage which is titled BURNISHED SURFACE. I have always contained these works in a 30×30 cm format to enable quick making and immediate reading of them. Now I am enlarging the scale. To create them I make a surface of cement using the same process as painting. This hardens to create a template from which I capture the surface, making a series of variations on the same motif. I use repetition and limit my materials to charcoal and oil, burnishing over the paper with the Venus mount of my hand. This collection is the only body of work I have made in the past twenty years, which is a direct response to mining, not about mining, but a response and with it I am using as an armature the tradition among miners in the region of Scotland where my family mined. After each shift, the men were brought up from “the pit” covered in coal dust. There were no changing rooms or showers on-site at that time, so their wife or children would wash them in a tin bath, scrubbing their bodies clean except for their spine. There, black dust was burnished into their skin and after a time became permanent. They believed it made their back stronger. White shirts, black jackets, Sunday Best clothes covering black paintings.
Where can we buy your art?
My work is with Singulart and Zealous and I publish where and when my work is being exhibited on my website.
What are your ambitions?
Someone once told me that for every life they had lived, I had lived three. I think it may be true. In those lives, I have fulfilled dreams and goals and despite some disastrous declines, I’ve had great success. My aim is to visit more regularly exhibitions where my work is being shown, so to experience being physically with my work as it’s seen, witnessing reactions so that I can get the reward. Regarding work, I simply want to have undisturbed continuity. It seems such a simple thing, but it evades me, so I would class that as an ambition.