Art can be a kind of Rorschach test. What one person may see in a painting may vary greatly from what another person sees. How a work touches us says as much about ourselves as it does about the artist.
Artist Bart O?Reilly, 31, originally from Dublin, Ireland, and part of the Baltimore art scene since 2003, would likely agree with this assessment.
“Found Fragments,” an exhibit of his works of acrylic on canvas that convey a “sense of transience” and motion, will be on display May 17-27 at the Baltimore Creative Alliance at the Patterson Theater. A reception will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 18.
“Many people find my works very open. They can read into them what they will. People expect me to have a fixed explanation, does this work mean this or that, but I don?t want to restrict the work to a personal narrative. Some may see a cloud, another, a face; that sort of thing,” O?Reilly said.
Still, each work is a personalexpression of the artist, reflecting “the fragmentary nature of memory, places and things,” O?Reilly said, noting the powerful influence of the mass media on his works.
“The media is a very formative and forceful thing in contemporary society. It triggered me to take moving images, images from films and historical documentaries, a flood of digital images, and project them on to the canvas. But sometimes the inspiration is something as simple as sitting on a train and looking out the window,” he said.
The paintings, which are for sale, range in price from about $650 to $2,000.
“Titles are really important to me. They always come to me after the work is finished. I?ll sit there and look at it for a long time, to decipher it, understand where it is linked to a particular memory … it connects to me,” he said.
For more information about Bart O?Reilly and to view images of his past works, visit his Web site at www.bartoreilly.com.
