Identifier: internationalstu75newy (find matches)
Title: International studio
Year: 1922 (1920 1920s)
Authors:
Subjects: Art Decoration and ornament
Publisher: New York
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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Miss O'Neill leavens the grim and terrible with an earthy, personal stroke. Of this attitude she comments: 'There are people who have found some of my pictures revolting. They hurt the eye. But I am not dejected—like Poe. I am in love with magic and monsters and the drama of form emerging from the formless.' But perhaps the closest affinity exists between the work of Miss O'Neill and that of William Blake. With her, as with him, poem and picture loom side by side, words and lines equally powerful. It is interesting to learn from Yeats Life of Blake that the true name of the earlier Irish in culling abstract ideas for more facile expression in sculpture. And sculpture with a brush—how adroit must be the touch! The prominence of Idea is ably illustrated in some of the drawings herewith reproduced. 'Mad' suggests a horror of consciousness rather than a personal madness. 'Centaur Escapes' embodies the spirit of freedom symbolized by the dash of the centaur into whirling clouds. 'The Future in the Lap of the Past' is a striking
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THE ETERNAL GESTURE
artist-poet was also O'Neill. Miss O'Neill has drawn her inspiration from such an equally living fount of symbolism and allegory as produced Blake's celebrated ghost of a flea. This same tendency to substitute an image for an idea which clouded the meaning of much of Blake's poetry, heightens Miss O'Neill's work, as there is probably no more effective medium for the transmission of intellectual meanings than through the natural mold of human form. What Blake lost in trying to embody abstract ideas in verse, Miss O'Neill gains picturization of that most abstract of conceptions—no less an intangible thing than Time itself. M. Alexandre has called Miss O'Neill his discovery. At her exhibition he was an enthusiast of her work. In a preface to the catalogue of the exhibition he says in part: With the revelation of these powerful drawings one is not surprised to learn that this strange and profound artist is also a great poet. The joy of these drawings is, it is true, rather strong and bitter but all the more rare; powerful forms adequate for powerful thoughts.

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