Loughran O’Connor will be instructing one of our Active Mind courses this spring: Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keefe: Iconic American Painters.
O’Connor earned her MA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and studied art history through a scholarship at the University of London. She has been exhibiting paintings for the last forty years and teaching art history for the last thirty.
We asked O’Connor what fascinates her most about the artists she will be focusing on during the spring semester, and this was her reply:
MARY CASSATT
Mary Cassatt was the ultimate career woman who managed to preserve her genius as a painter. She loved the fashion and architecture of Paris. When she wanted a chateau, she simply bought one from her sales! She reinvented the use of French paste—finely ground pigmented chalks that she used in luminous portraits. Each painting is built upon solid design; together they form a serious narrative about family relations.
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GEORGIA O'KEEFE
Georgia O'Keefe became famous almost despite herself. Unlike Cassatt, she shunned family and society and became more reclusive as she aged. After finishing a series of revolutionary paintings based almost purely upon design in New York, she moved to the American western plains. Her paintings—created in a renovated pueblo monastery—show us the magnificence of the desert country, mountains and life forms.
