About The Artist
Loughran O’Connor was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, eventually attending the Ivy School of Art.
She also worked as an illustrator for a number of Pittsburgh’s graphic design studios and was the art director for the “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” television program.
From 1970 through 1972, she was an art director for Ketchum Advertising, while also drawing, painting and participating in local exhibitions.
In late 1972, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, earning an MFA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and spending 1977 and 1978 as an International Scholarship Student at the University of London.
She also studied in Florence, Italy, before she began teaching painting and art history for eight years at City College of San Francisco.
About the Art
Yearning is ever-present in Loughran O’Connor’s work. They are ecstatic images.
Not just desiring to see, but seeing or, moreover, being by having imagined.
Because however much they exist now, they clearly carry within them the residue of their creation, of an activity whose only limit was a complex beauty not determined in advance.
That is, they could as well not have been, either as they now are or, for that matter, at all.
There is an alchemy at work in these paintings. It’s in the difficulties our painter confronts (and either solves or makes peace with), the basic possibility (or its opposite) that these objects might actually come to be, and in such a way that the infinite power of desire is made palpable and visible.
What does the painter desire?
Too often, we think this or that, only to find that each achieved goal nonetheless finds us just as unsatisfied, as desiring, as before.
That’s part of what it is to be human.
And these paintings specifically reflect back to us the particular and occasional faces of that desire:
ethereal, ferocious, unhinged, whirling desire, always dramatic, the transient monumenta of a generally frantic present as the only position for the truth of what painting is.