Aleda O'Connor

Aleda O’Connor is a Toronto-born, Hamilton-based artist and a Fine Art graduate from the University of Guelph. She has been working in oil pastels for more than 20 years, one of very few artists to work primarily in this medium.

Until recently, she drew her inspiration from the Canadian rural landscape and the weather systems that influence it. In 2014, she turned her attention to sheep as a subject for her very successful solo exhibition, Flock. In a 2015 two-person exhibition with Barry Coombs, #Hamilton Two Views, she added urban landscape to her repertoire.

The search for weather, landscapes and sheep has taken her across Canada, to the United States, Mexico, Ireland, England, France, Italy and Portugal.

Her work has been shown in galleries in Canada and South Korea and is represented in private collections in Canada, the United States and Ireland. Her paintings are also featured on sets for such Canadian television programs as Rookie Blue and Saving Hope.

Aleda O’Connor’s unique and ethereal oil pastel paintings examine the ways in which atmosphere and landscape are defined by light, air and water. 

While her subjects are instantly recognizable, they balance a creative tension between the requirements of the oil pastel and her visual exploration of the effect of weather on her subjects.

Her distinctive mark making and textured surfaces emerge from a commitment to drawing that underpins a vigorous engagement with her preferred wood panels. She employs various combinations of cross-hatching, scratching and scraping to layer lines and masses of colour. 

Aleda spent her childhood summers in on a farm at Bond Head north of Toronto. As a teenager, she was inspired by renowned Canadian artists Charles Comfort and Carl Schaefer, who were close family friends and regular visitors to the property. She acquired a permanent affection for Southern Ontario’s rural agricultural landscape and remains inspired by the geometry of open fields, drumlins and woodlots. These rural forms anchor her observations of the climatic conditions that continuously transform familiar landscapes. In her search for places that are shaped by weather she discovered sheep, a subject she has returned to many times.

Aleda spends several weeks every summer on New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island where she contemplates the ocean, wind and mists of the Bay of Fundy.