Cait O’Connor

Poetic characters, delicate and neat textures, fascinating athmospheres are the trademark of Cait O’Connor’s paintings and illustrations. Her masterful use of colors and media and her skills as costume designer allows her to create marvellous large scale pieces such as her recent “Girls I know” series.  Women depicted as mysterious and almost ghostly entities, escaping earthly judgement, are the subject of a dream-like world that hits the viewer with melancholy and a yearning for an unattainable harmony. Playing with a cold palette to render transparencies, veils and graceful draperies, Cait creates a fairy-tale stage for these aloof and detached girls, lost in their imaginary world.

“I am looking at women hiding in plain sight. This is a series of portraits where the subject is avoiding the viewer. These are very large paintings; they are aggressive advertisements, though the focus is unclear. The medium and the subject are in disagreement. Variations in flatness and depth, collaged form and over-stated pattern camouflage and hide these girls.”

Cait O’Connor is an illustrator, painter and costume designer who lives and works in New York City. She recently obtained her MFA from the Department of Design for Stage and Film at NYU. In addition to fine art, Cait works in opera, dance, theater and film. She has recently designed large-scale puppets and interactive costumes with Michael Curry for The Paris Opera. Cait has exhibited work in New York Galleries including the Monique Goldstrom gallery in Soho and has participated in the group exhibition Wildly Different Things: New York and Dublin organized by  BlueLeaf Gallery, Dublin, and Contaminate NYC. She was awarded a Graduate Assistant scholarship by New York University and was the recipient of the Island Fund Award in 2004.