La Loma is pleased to announce Split Water, a solo presentation of ten new paintings by Maine-based artist Tessa Greene O’Brien.

Tessa Greene O’Brien conceived of the paintings in Split Water in a Northeastern summer when the word “water” is spoken on repeat, the weather report announcing droughts and floods. In summer, our bodies seek new and familiar places: bays, lakes, beaches, ponds, and rivers. The painter looks at the water in a painterly way.

What does that mean, “a painterly way?” Looking is a heightened act of the mind, the senses, the memory, and the desire to unify all three. A body moves in water, both joining and rearranging it. A painter’s gaze moves through the landscape like a body in water. And meaning. The painter is always asking, what does the water mean? And she tries to answer in paint, in the time it takes to make a painting, in the eternal question, Did I get it right? Did I do the water justice?

Establishing water as the organizing subject, O’Brien is then free to draw upon a rich range of references in her making, including the Supports/Surfaces Movement, Color Field Painting, and the Canadian Group of Seven. If place is the mouth of the river, then painting is the whole ocean.

O’Brien begins by painting in the landscape, working from direct observation. Plein air painting harnesses the ecstasies and frustrations of changing weather, insects, nightfall. Then, she transmutes the images through a process of dyeing, cutting, bleaching and sewing the canvas, before returning to paint. The completed object is distinctly physical—frayed edges are sewn into the surface, nudging the viewer out of a strictly illusionistic space. This physicality recalls the artist’s experience of the landscape, her swimming, and, in their glimmering openness, these paintings remind us of our own bodies of water.

– Emily Farranto