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REVIEWSBrian O'Connor's art is stirring. He creates allegories where assorted devices manipulate the body....O'Connor's allegories tell an enigmatic story whose point is to lead the viewer to confront a deeper universal dilemma. —Roberta Carasso, LAGUNA NEWS-POST, October 11, 2001. O'Connor makes powerfully illusionistic work of epic proportion in both size and scope. —Tracy Mobley-Martinez, ALBUQUERQUE TRIBUNE, October 30, 1998 O'Connor's staged vignettes are the psychological inside story of our changing world... The talent for accurate drawing and realism in painting has obviously survived. — Wesley Pulkka, ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL, October 21, 1999. |
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O'Connor's quasi-fantastic scenarios appear as if through an art historical scrim that connects him and his metaphoric subject matter to the long tradition of western easel painting. It's a tradition to which O'Connor contributes his own quirky and enigmatic themes and his considerable skill as a realist painter... It is characteristic of O'Connor to traffic in allegory as he carefully composes his visual narratives that have as their subtext, for example, the history of easel painting, the fate of the world, his own cunningmanipulation of pictorial spaces, and that old notion that the child is father to the man. —Diane Armitage, THE MAGAZINE, October, 1994 O'Connor is a gifted realist painter whose increasingly dark vision continues to expand as he adds to his narrative of millenial observations... What O'Connor does in his work is pose questions about our complicity with the forces of degradation that seem to increasingly govern our fate and compromise the quality of play and poetry of our children... a compelling indictment against the half life of irony and misplaced desire. —Diane Armitage, THE MAGAZINE, April, 1997. O'Connor dwells on (and in) dim rooms peopled by troubled figures and comic- threatening specters of politicians, madmen and other creatures... which adeptly combines dreams and realism in a perfect moral pitch. —SANTA FE REPORTER, November, 1990 O'Connor's beautifully painted landscapes serve as backdrops for people doing extremely odd things. —Mary Voelz Chandler Like an Edvard Munch on crack... —Tracy Mobley-Martinez It's enough to transform any viewer into a hard-core feminist. —Cathy Byrd Only artist and mad scientists live where they work, in their laboratories. —Gus Blaisdale, KING OF HATS, THE MAGAZINE, January, 1990 For more comprehensive analysis, see Like a Mattress Balances on a Bottle of Wine, The Paintings of Brian O'Connor, by Gus Blaisdale, written for the American Rennaissance project in Atlanta in 1997.
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