Ireland-based artist Therese O’Keeffe creates paintings that make it easy to enjoy a spring day no matter the time of year. Using a brush and palette knife, she applies thick pigment to the canvas and depicts colorful fields of flowers. In O’Keeffe’s world, the sky is always a perfect shade of blue and the blossoms are bountiful. They offer a visual respite—especially if you find yourself dreaming of escaping the office and frolicking among nature.
O’Keeffe’s love of the outdoors was born from living in the countryside. She began her artistic practice as a hobby but soon found that it was fulfilling and gave her a sense of satisfaction. “Painting flowers allows me to interpret natural beauty creatively,” she tells My Modern Met, “and flowers give me the freedom to take artistic license to explore abstract and Impressionist styles in an intuitive way.” Far from a hobby now, O’Keeffe has people from around the world admiring her bucolic paintings.
The tactile quality of O’Keeffe’s work begs you to reach out and touch it. There are layers of color that give the 2D canvases a three-dimensional quality—as if you were really walking through these tall blooms. To do this, O’Keeffe takes advantage of the cake-like characteristics that can be achieved with the pigment. “I paint in oils,” she explains, “so each layer has to dry before I paint over it and to create the light and dark shadows that make a painting stand out.”
O’Keeffe sells her paintings of flowers online and participates in “one big exhibition a year.” You can find her work at Art Source in Dublin, Ireland from November 14 to November 17, 2019.
Using a three-dimensional approach to her paintings of flowers, artist Therese O'Keeffe creates dreamy landscapes that will make you want to frolic in their fields.
