Carmel Shore 1919

Rose O'Neill painted “Carmel Shore” at an unknown date, probably using oils. The colour palette is fairly muted, and her dabs of paint look like they were applied in a quick process. There’s a real physicality to how she’s built up the surface, especially in the foreground. The brushstrokes are thick and loaded with paint, giving the sand dunes a textured, almost sculptural quality. Look at how she uses these little touches of color to create depth and shadow. The dark green spots that are sprinkled throughout the landscape, they almost seem to float on top of the painting's surface. They are placed so carefully. O’Neill was also a cartoonist and illustrator. So she probably thought about landscape painting as a problem of storytelling in a way. It reminds me of the looser landscapes of someone like Pierre Bonnard, where the joy is in the suggestive mark, rather than any fixed idea of representation. It is a reminder that art is a kind of visual conversation.