Painting is a personal and heartfelt journey for me. It is a conscious and deliberate “questing” for greater self-awareness and expression.

If I were to name what I do in a short sentence, it would read something like: “this artist offers us glimpses from the ‘Belly of one’s Soul.’”

My paintings are not intended to be “easy” or pleasant. I begin with intuition and a determination to find a rhythm within the painting that resonates with my own life experiences.  Arising from my imagination -- in the realm of serendipity, spontaneity and accident -- an indirect narrative often presents itself in themes such as personal empowerment; tumultuous family relationships; marital challenges; awakening feminine consciousness; and epiphanies.

As an artist, my greatest joy comes from viewers’ responses. It is in the sharing of the work, and the hoped-for connection with another soul, that my quest in painting completes itself."

Ursula O'Farrell
(September, 2009)
 

Brief excerpts from the essay "Phoenix Rising: The Remarkable Story of Ursula O’Farrell" by Dr. Susan Landauer (2009, Oakland, California)

"Where does the execution of a picture start, where does it end? At the moment when intense feelings are fused at the depths of one’s being, when they erupt, and [the whole] thought flows forth like lava from a volcano. . . . Cold and rational calculations have nothing to do with this eruption, for who knows when, in the depths of his being, the work was begun, perhaps unconsciously?"

                                                                                    Paul Gauguin, 1898

           
......It is understandable that Selz and other commentators initially placed O’Farrell in the Bay Area Figurative school considering that she worked exclusively from the figure and used her models as scaffolds for extravagant painterly escapades. As she told an interviewer in 2007, “I love thick, juicy paint. It doesn’t have to be controlled; it can be globbed on or even smeared on. And that’s good; that’s what paint does.” Like Bischoff, Diebenkorn, and Park, she draws heavily from the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism, which she has admired since graduate school. Indeed, when Clement Greenberg, the New York critic who helped put the movement on the map, defined its essential features, he came strikingly close to describing O’Farrell’s work: 

"If the label ‘Abstract Expressionism’ means anything, it means painterliness: loose, rapid handling or the look of it; masses that blotted and fused instead of shapes that stayed distinct; large and conspicuous rhythms; broken color; uneven saturations or densities of paint, exhibited brush, knife or finger marks . . ."

That kind of spontaneous bravura brushwork continues to characterize Ursula’s painting, and her first figurative forays specifically show the influence of the Bay Area Figurative triumvirate. One of her most ambitious paintings, the diptych Flying Into It (2007), bears the unmistakable imprint of Bischoff with its buttery, melting brushwork and dreamy atmosphere. The multi-figure canvas can be compared to paintings such as Bischoff’s large Three Bathers, an homage to Cézanne, with much of the same romantic unio mystica that both artists pursued, in which the figures revel in a kind of sensory osmosis with nature. By contrast, the heroic postures found in O’Farrell’s more clearly defined Bather (2007) and Standing Figure (Confident) (2007) demonstrate the more sculptural approach of David Park, whose figures, unlike Bischoff’s, are boldly defined by shadow and light, often filling up the canvas to confront the viewer head on.

            Yet as early as 2007, O’Farrell was already straying from the formulae of her predecessors. Paintings such as Lost in Thought (c. 2007), though far more benign than de Kooning’s Women series, evoke the Dutch-born New York Abstract Expressionist’s figural distortion and dematerialization of form, the magical effect his art dealer Allan Stone memorably called “liquified cubism.”  In other cases, notably O’Farrell’s Seated Figure (Melinda) (2007), there are portents of contemporary British painter Frank Auerbach, whose figure paintings, always done directly from the model, nonetheless became so abstract that they are barely recognizable as representations of anything beyond heavily impastoed swipes and slabs of paint.

            In 2008, O’Farrell made a decisive move toward greater abstraction in keeping with her goal of delving deeper into her own psyche, to create not only a “condensation of sensations,” to use Bischoff’s phrase, but to tap the inner depths of her personal storehouse of emotions and subconscious memory bank. The leap began with an intentional decision in October 2007 to dispense with the figure and paint entirely from imagination, working rapidly without preliminary study. Whereas before, as Selz remarked, her paintings had represented a conversation between “artist and model,” now they became a dialogue between artist and canvas.  Since then, as O’Farrell wrote,

"My working method is much more a flowering of the dance with the paint, using intuition to guide me. Leaving myself at the door and trying to feel my way through the painting. I spin and turn the canvas to see what it wants to become. Is it a figure—a grouping of figures? An abstract that is moving forward? My [intellect and] ego wants a sense of direction, and yet has no place in the studio . . . what comes out is raw and hopefully connects with my sense of what is true. . . . [The] work is about being human and sharing from an open ‘kimono’ position—where nothing is held back."

Faith in Affirmation:  The Work of Ursula O'Farrell

Anthony Torres (San Francisco, 2009)

Ursula O’Farrell’s paintings have often been identified as contemporary heirs to a history associated with Bay Area Figurative Art and its concerns with conflating representational subject matter — still life, portraits, landscapes, and here, the female figure — and Abstract Expressionism’s formal concerns, which emphasized process, handling of paint, and addressing the essentials of medium.

However, while O’Farrell’s painting may foreground expressionistic representation of the human form in abstract painterly space, in contradistinction to Bay Area Figurative artists who focused on the world around them, her work qualitatively differs in its immersion in what might be best described as a realm of personal spirituality anchored in the materiality of painterly color and artistic expression. 

Faith in the transformative power of creative self-determination is affirmed in her work, and this serves as a vehicle for evoking and fusing memories, thoughts, and emotions — past and present — which speaks to a condensed personal history and subjectivity that is constantly shifting, fluid, and ever evolving. 

Her work should perhaps be characterized as representing psychic excavations — conscious and unconscious — that bring to the surface traces of life passages through creative processes that construct and reveal private spaces. These exploratory adventures are anchored in painterly articulation and an abundant application of color, here rendering fragmented figures and forms.

If the spectral images that emerge speak to personal associations and stories through formal strategies congealed in the work, they do so in a manner that is very open to multiple interpretations, with a language that resonates from art historically derived discourses associated with Bay Area Figurative art and its concern with the conflation of the figure with formal strategies inherited from abstraction. 

Indeed, these issues and concerns are reflected in Ursula O’Farrell’s passionate treatment of surface textures and loose application of paint, which she uses to conjure generalized figures in nebulous pictorial spaces for very private and personal reasons, and presents as a vehicle to elicit a visual dialogue and visceral response in her viewers.