Eugene Columba O'Brien is an Irish artist who paints primarily abstract expressionist figurative and portrait studies. His principle medium is oil, using an expressive and gestural technique on paper, mount board and canvas.
These paintings are an invitation to engage with his figures on a moral, spiritual and emotional level. His compositions blend the subject of each painting into their environment, while in the process creating a foreboding sense of psychological tension. What could be said about all of O’Brien’s subjects is that they inhabit an eerie locale, a place most suitable for a fallen humanity.
His art represents a striving to reconcile the inner dimensions of instinct and emotion, with an external world which can be at times overwhelming in its natural splendor. He has attempted to map that special place where both of these worlds meet. These paintings are also a study of the struggle between multifarious emotions and feelings: those necessary though overwhelming emotions which can often undermine our spiritual cohesion, though at the same time being able to embolden us with renewed vitality and respect for life.
