Helen O'Toole

Helen O'Toole (born 1963) is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune, The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequently discuss the interplay in her work between abstraction, the evocation of otherworldly light, land and space, and a commitment to investigating meaning through a painting process akin to the processes of cultivation and excavation. Artforum critic James Yood wrote, "echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paint surges toward mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit"; She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a Contemporary Northwest Art Award (both 2016), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, among other awards. O'Toole lives in Seattle, Washington and is Professor of Art and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program at the University of Washington.

Helen O'Toole, Mary Larkin's Bottom, oil on canvas (diptych), 100" x 156", 2013. Portland Art Museum Collection.

Life and career O'Toole was born in County Mayo in the rural west of Ireland in 1963. She attended the Institute of Technology, Sligo and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (BA, Painting and Drawing, 1986), where her early painting was influenced by European modernists such as Alberto Burri, Asger Jorn, and Antoni Tàpies. She returned to the United States, living in New York for a year while renting a studio in Brooklyn, before she accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle in 1996. as displaying an Abstract-Expressionist "sense of natural flux"; writers two and three decades later discuss her work as existing on the cusp between abstract and figurative and being rooted in observable facts that are "summoned only to dissolve." Writers also liken her work to the subjective, late landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the "dim complexity" of Albert Pinkham Ryder's seascapes, of the experiences, history, and terrain of her native region. Salli McQuaid characterized her work as moody and intense with an "undercurrent of dark passion and superstition" common to Irish culture; and Pagan Pilgrimage (1992), O'Toole created atmospheric expanses and pictorial incident through washes, drips, spills, gesture and texture. others, such as James Yood, affirmed what he termed the "seething ebb and flow of the forces of color" and precarious, "nervous balance of pictorial forces." Combined with the enveloping, monumental scale of much of the work, or Gan Ainm (2016–8) enables viewers to enter into what some have called a "meteorological-psychological space" This work was exhibited on its own in a 2007 Linenhall Arts Centre solo show titled "Beag" ("Small") featuring 32 works on paper of six to fourteen inches. O'Toole has said that these small-scale works (for example, Cross, 2001 or St. Patrick's Well I , 2007) (both 2015), and the larger paintings Everywhere (2013, 100" x 156") and The Lay of the Land (2016–8, 88" x 192").

Awards and recognition O'Toole has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (Fine Arts, 2016), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2013) and Jack and Grace Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellowships (2009-2012, 2013- 2015) and Milliman Endowment Fund awards (2007–13) from the University of Washington, among others. Her work has been acquired by many private collections, as well as those of the Portland Art Museum, the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and the Institute of Technology, Sligo.