December Artist Spotlight
Meet Rowan O’Riley
Rowan O’Riley is a painter of contemporary impressionist portraits living in Wellesley. She paints primarily in acrylics, but occasionally in oil. Her characteristic style employs bold, bright colors to create likenesses with warmth and energy.
Ms. O’Riley is the mother of 3 amazing women and was a competitive horseback rider until recently. She owns 2 equestrian training facilities in Wellington, FL and also sponsors a Paralympic athlete who brought home 3 gold medals from the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games.
Background
Ms. O’Riley began painting in 2012 by taking a Newton Adult Education course recommended by a painter she admired. (Ann Marie O’Dowd, whose brightly colored and patterned paintings of animals were displayed for years at the Wellesley Quebrada store.) With no prior experience, the process of learning to paint was challenging, but the fellow students who routinely signed up for the same course session after session, year after year, were a talented and friendly group, willing to share their knowledge. The instructor Zhanna Cantor was skillful at assisting each student to work on his/her own project. Ms. O’Riley’s results were colorful, but uneven—especially her early attempts at portraits, which often looked grotesque 😆 (if you know, you know).
In 2020, Ms. O’Riley began painting with a skilled artist friend, who shared his techniques with her, and in one brave experiment, worked from the same portrait reference photo while the Mentor artist was in Florida and Ms. O’Riley was in MA. They worked together over FaceTime for weeks, eventually producing two very similar oil paintings of the same subject.
That experience was the key to developing a method that worked for Ms. O’Riley to begin painting portraits on her own.
Artistic Development
After taking an 8-week online course called “Bold Color Bootcamp” offered by the Canadian artist Charla Maarschalk, Ms. O’Riley began to experiment with value, using bright colors according to their lightness or darkness to create portrait images. This was during the Covid lockdown period, when many people were cut off from socializing or working with others. It was a great time to learn new things, but also a very isolated and lonely time. Weekly Zoom calls with family and friends provided connection, and Ms. O’Riley missed the faces of those she loved. So, she began to paint portraits using the newly acquired technique of using colors for their values.
Subjects
During this time, Ms. O’Riley created a series called “My Covid 19”, featuring the 19 faces that she saw regularly when she saw almost no one else. These included her family, her house cleaner, her postman, her contractor and other familiar faces in her everyday life. The process of creating these portraits proved to be a joyful appreciation of each person’s presence.
Process
Ms. O’Riley works from photographs of her subjects, choosing full-front-facing photos that are a frank and candid representation of the individual. She converts the photos to black and white and then creates a sketch to map the features of the subject, relying on the use of a projector to make sure the features are accurate. (Thus avoiding the grotesque effect of features that are a little bit “off”).
Always mixing her colors ahead of time, Ms. O’Riley uses a Sta-Wet palette to keep the acrylics fresh for up to several weeks. She creates an underpainting using watered-down acrylic paint, and then gradually builds
layers of bright colors, following their values on a grey scale for value. Each portrait goes through an ugly stage, but this is often resolved during the following session.
Ms. O’Riley usually takes 10-12 hours to finish a portrait, using the time between painting sessions to look from a distance or take photos with her phone to gauge the accuracy of the likeness. One of her frequent techniques is to take a photo of the painting, convert the photo to black and white, and compare the new black and white image to her reference image.
Why do you paint?
I paint faces because I love people. I find faces more fascinating than landscapes and equally complex. The process of painting a portrait gives me the opportunity to look very closely at the face of my subjects and notice the nuances of their facial expression. I think people wear the face they create as they live their lives.
What next?
I am almost finished with a large series of portraits of my extended family, all painted on a yellow ochre background in bright colors and using full front-facing views of my subjects. Next I would like to explore how little information I can use to create a likeness, and how to create likenesses with only one or two colors. I am also eager to paint faces of people I do not know well, and to incorporate poses that are partial, such as looking up or down or to the side. And to broaden what I can convey in a portrait, I might want to incorporate objects or symbols relevant to the life of the subject.