Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/603345
257 257 Handell—the influence of each is visible in O'Connell's work. Today, she works seven days a week to squeeze in all of what she wishes to accomplish. "It's a lot of hours," she says. "I don't think you choose to do it. I think you have to do it." When O'Connell first started painting, it was the brilliant, strong light and its effects that she wanted to render most. "Now I like the subtleties, too, like on a cloudy or rainy day." Of the very early morn- ing light in winter she says, "I don't think there's anything like it." She notes, too, that "snow is always dif- ferent depending on the light." Like many winter lovers, O'Connell be- lieves there is just something about falling snow that makes scenes that may otherwise go unnoticed stand out as suddenly magical. "I've been told people are not in- terested in winter landscapes," she says, "but I just love when it snows. I feel like a little kid. I love the way it unifies everything." So taken is she with the season and its elements, O'Connell talks about getting snow- shoes so she can strap her easel on her back and get out to more remote places. To deal with those elements, she uses a car mat to put rubber between her boots and the frozen ground. "You just have to set up out of the wind. Sometimes, a snowy winter day isn't as cold as a day in April if you are in the right spot." These days, she gets outside at least once or twice a week to look for landscape subjects and to do small studies. "Even if I don't have a successful day, just being out there—I get something from it. I'm always studying." She also plans painting travel trips, most recently to San Juan, Puerto Rico. But she equally appreciates a jaunt up the coast to Maine's Marginal Way for Top, Along the Iron Fence Bottom, A Winter Landscape a day at the easel. Of her winter landscapes, two are particularly popular. They depict the same road in Essex. For those she set up and did a study of the scene's shadows and color and time of day, and then took photographs from which she later worked to build the painting, tak- ing a different viewpoint, from the center of the road. (That's a way to play with composition while mak- ing all the details true to life.) She rarely makes prints of her work, but of these she did. "It's interest- ing how some paintings appeal to so many people. I think those paintings that have a simplicity about them are sometimes the strongest." Come winter, she plans to paint from a little spot she loves in her hometown of Billerica. Just off Andover Road by the Whiffle Tree Shop, she says, "There's a series of antique buildings and a little tiny covered bridge—it's as beautiful as anywhere in Vermont. It's very wooded, so you have to be there when there is good sun to get some kind of effect. I look forward to going there."