Painter Tessa G. O’Brien grew up in Maine, on a property containing marshes, fields, meadows, gardens, and forest. Today, she tries to capture her home state’s sense of “mystery, magic, and the sublime” in her art while shying away from “total nostalgia”—“I’ll paint wherever I am,” she says. O’Brien, who now lives in South Portland, Maine, began painting full-time about a decade ago. “My practice is closely tied to observation, but there’s a layer of atmosphere and memory and emotion that I want to infuse,” she says. She considers herself a landscape painter but also works in still life. Recently, several of her finished works were part of a group exhibition, As We Are, at the Portland Museum of Art.
Celestia & Syrena, 2024, oil, bleach, wax resist on dyed canvas, 80 x 60 inches. (Courtesy of the artist.)
O’Brien begins each composition with what she calls “bath day,” when she cuts swaths of linen or canvas and moves them between three large vats of dye: yellow, warm red or pink tones, and cool blue tones. “I’m not going for a consistent, even dye,” she says. “I like [the fabric] to have a surface texture.” After she washes and dries the dyed fabric, she stretches it to create the substrate for her process. “There’s already a kind of composition on there,” she says. “I’ll look through my photo folder of landscapes or nature scenes to see if [the shapes] remind me of anything.” She begins to draw with bleach over the colored canvas, then employs batik—the method of pouring hot wax over the lighter areas to make sure further pigment can’t touch those spots—before once again layering dye to establish the darker areas. The resulting color field of light and dark slowly becomes her chosen still life or landscape composition. Painting is “an emotional experience,” she says, “and that is how I try to connect with the viewer. I want my paintings to convey kindness, expansiveness, wonder, a sense of play, a sense of delight.”
