Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “New Work”

by Mark Van Proyen

SFMOMA, San Francisco, California

Exhibition continues through October 20, 2024

August 10, 2024

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “Jabberwocky,” 1976-77, lampblack pigment, glitter, and pastel on unstretched canvas, 84 x144”. Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco. Copyright © Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

In this exhibition of five paintings created between 2021 to 2023, Mary Lovelace O’Neal shows us what the recent excitement over this veteran artist is all about. Similar examples of her recent work were among the few highlights of last Spring’s Whitney Biennial. Viewers were reminded that good things are sometimes worth a long wait, sixty years in the case of Lovelace O’Neal’s long and underrecognized career.

Four of the five works presented here are horizontally formatted and epically scaled, emphasizing large expanses of a deep nocturnal black. Close observation can sometimes detect small amounts of red or blue mixed with the black, while in other instances, the black is unadulterated. All feature gestural flat shapes of bright, almost incandescent color floating and flickering throughout their respective picture spaces, all evocative and about half intimating ghostly fragments of figures captured in low light. Other shapes include looping whip thrusts formed of colorful chalk pastel starkly contrasted against the black ground.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal, “La Pieta,” 2022-23, mixed media. All images courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Karen Jenkins-Johnson. Photo: Don Ross

The exhibition checklist designates all five as “mixed media.” In all cases I could not tell if I was looking at oil or acrylic paint, indicating that the difference does not matter, nor should it.

In “La Pieta” (2022-23) we see a cluster of random shapes formed out of white and pink magenta to the left, some deliberate and others more improvisatory, even wispy. Gradually, the partial silhouette of a figure in profile comes into focus, haunting the rest of the painting. Near the center we see another silhouette, that of a young girl by the looks of her hair and countenance, clad in aqua and light purple. She is positioned at the threshold of an open doorway, backlit in bright yellow light pouring from an adjacent room. This could be a salute to the mystery figure depicted in the background of Velasquez’s “Las Meninas.” More to the painting’s point is the ambiguity as to whether the figure is standing or sitting, just entering the picture space or exiting from the foreground. The foreground space also features a floating cluster of three yellow lemons in the upper right side of the composition. They pay homage to the three lemons made famous in Francisco de Zubarán’s “Still-life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose.”

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “Mardi Gras Umbrellas & Fireflies,” 2021–23. Photo: Michael Covián

Certainly, the yellow set against the black background also invites this comparison, but in Lovelace O’Neal’s version the allusion seems like a fragment from a half-remembered dream. Such attributes also appear in the other paintings, each upholding an almost perfect balance between lyricism and aggressive grandeur that never lapses into morbidity.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “Francis,” 2021–23. Photo: Michael Covián

Even though she now resides near Mérida, Mexico, Lovelace O’Neal has deep northern California roots. She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute through most of the 1970s, joining the faculty of the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice in 1979, working there until 2006. While in graduate school at Columbia University, she became acquainted with Raymond Saunders’ essay titled “Black as a Color,” initially published in 1967 in Arts Magazine. That essay had a major and lasting influence on many African American artists, most notably Kerry James Marshall. Although it was written as a response to Ishmael Reed’s self-nomination as spokesperson for all African American artists, Saunders’ essay also warned of the dangers of self-ghettoization, while at the same time asserting that black should not be understood as the absence of color. On the contrary, it should be seen as the universal fulfillment of color, the necessary precondition that allows light to exist.

Mark Van Proyen has written commentaries emphasize the tragic consequences of blind faith placed in economies of narcissistic reward. In 2020, he retired from the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught Painting and Art History. From 2003 to 2018, he was a corresponding editor for Art in America. 

Photo credit: Mary Ijichi