Out to Sea 

Curator: Out to Sea by Rose O’Neill. The oil paint, heavily applied, gives it a tangible weight. What strikes me most is how O'Neill handles the material of paint itself. What do you make of that? Editor: It's interesting. You can really see the individual brushstrokes. They aren't blended to create an illusion; rather, they stand out and give this texture and dimensionality to the cliffs. Curator: Precisely! It begs the question, what’s being depicted here: A cliff, a sea…or simply, paint? How do the material conditions shape our understanding of "landscape"? We often forget about the labour that goes into these ‘effortless’ landscapes and seascapes. The paint doesn’t simply appear on the canvas. Editor: I never thought about it like that. Now that you mention the materiality of the paint itself, I am seeing it as a series of intentional marks…almost like a constructed environment rather than a replication of nature. It is pretty clever. Curator: Think of the Victorian era and its obsession with ‘nature.’ O’Neill gives us something different here: she takes something "natural", the landscape, and deconstructs it. And by doing so, reveals the structures of painting and production behind the landscape genre. Are we looking at art or labor here? Or, are we meant to see the connection between both. Editor: That gives me so much to think about regarding this piece and landscapes generally. Thank you! Curator: My pleasure! Hopefully, you are seeing it less as a pretty scene and more as the culmination of resources and, more crucially, an exercise of critical practice and labor.