I recently painted on top of some old photographs of my father, James Terence (Terry) O'Brien.
I think in the left picture he was around 18-20 years old(?). On the right, maybe 4-6 years old(?)
- 5 x 7" each, acrylic paint on photographic paper, 2025. I was trying to do something that was kind-of-sort-of-like the artist John Baldessari... but different, maybe. I used aspirational text for the work but why I chose those particular words for those particular photographs is unknown to me, it just felt right. This piece was challenging to paint because…
I finished a new painting and... I'm not sure what to title it!
So I completed a new painting that is both old and new. The two panels on the left are 6.5 x 10” each. They were painted in 2020 during the thick of the pandemic. My family and I were stuck in our little NYC apartment back then, and at that time, it felt as though time had no meaning. Tick, tock, tick, tock. I would bring my daughter down to the basement to watch Yellow Submarine on DVD and try to escape the boredom… sort of. During the Sixty Four part of the film the animation counts down (or maybe up?) to 64 (around the 2:00 mark), so these two paintings were taken directly from that sequence. It was just something I wanted to paint at that time; I had no restraints. I just enjoyed the process.
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