Hugh O'Donnell, the London-born artist and professor of painting at Boston University's College of Fine Arts, opened the summer season with this handsome, splashy show. These recent paintings drew a great deal of substance from the artist's country home overlooking nearby Lake Waramug. A strong colorist who roots his work in Abstract Expressionism - an previously, Miro - O'Donnell has latrely shifted his interests from life aboveground to suggestions of organisms and movement underwater.
But he is not exclusively devoted to blues and aquamarines, despite an abundance of canvases bearing hues we associate with water and sky., nor was a patented New England tranquility inb evidence. O'Donnell's oils - thickly twisted and layered in shapes suggesting snakes, water weeds, circuitous escape routes, and streaks of night light - roil nature as much as they stare deeply into it.
With a sculptor's or ceramicist's hand, O'Donnell occasionally stipples his biomorphic brushstrokes with browns - as in New Growth (2010) or Terraforma (2011) - to signal fecundity and the earth;'s cycles, but also darkness and muck. Often, he uses the punning power of colors' names. In a Lemon Tree (2011), for instance, is soaked in a yellow one can almost taste. Grey Gatherer (2011). awash in tadpole bursts, questions whether gray is being harvested or is doing the garnering.
In the '70s, O'Donnell studied Zen ink painting in Japan, and the works here clearly demonstrated that calligraphic influence. He has teased a singular visual language out of abstract shapes and devised a personal form of communication.