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The painter whose lampblack abstractions stayed uncategorizable for six decades died May 10 in Mérida.
May 10. Mary Lovelace O'Neal died in Mérida, Mexico, at eighty-four. Six decades of work, most of it monumental, most of it in lampblack, and most of it resistant to the categories that usually settle around a painter by mid-career.
The work was abstract, but not in the way that lets a gallery wall text explain it in three adjectives. Richly hued, large-scale, built from a material (lampblack) that doesn't cooperate with brightness the way oil does. The paintings accumulated color slowly, in layers, until the surface read as both dark and luminous. A technical problem she solved by ignoring the usual solutions.
She taught for decades. Activism ran parallel to the studio practice. The biography includes all the expected marks of a serious career: exhibitions, collections, retrospectives. But the work stayed outside the lineage people tried to place it in. Not Color Field, not post-painterly, not exactly gestural. Just O'Neal's.
The art press filed her primarily as an educator and activist during her lifetime. The painting, monumental and technically specific as it was, stayed secondary in most of the coverage. A reversal that happens often enough to have a pattern: the work that doesn't fit a movement gets described by everything around it instead.
She was eighty-four. The work is still uncategorizable.
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