Seeing Worcester’s Elm Park in a whole new light

Masterful exhibit of paintings by Christina Pappas O’Neill at Quinsigamond Community College.

By Leon Nigrosh

April 2004 – Some people may think that the Mass Pike is the Worcester/Boston connector. But perhaps that title should go to artist Christina Pappas O’Neill. In her new show at Quinsigamond Community College she manages to capture both the hustle and bustle of activity at Boston’s famous outdoor market as well as the late afternoon calm of Frederick Law Olmstead’s historic park in downtown Worcester.

O’Neill has always been involved in art, ever since she was a kid growing up in the Bay State art colony of Rockport. Largely self-taught, she worked chiefly in acrylics and oils — showing extensively in the ‘80s and again in the mid-90s. She was a founding member of the women’s collaborative ART XII, just about the time she became the Managing Editor of the Worcester Business Journal. For more than a dozen years she was also a freelance art reviewer for Worcester Magazine. Then came a five-year hiatus from her easel.

With a chance to show all new work, this time in watercolor, but with a very short timetable, O’Neill visited Haymarket in Boston and also Elm Park. In each place she took a number of digital photographs and then entered the pictures into her computer. Using Microsoft’s watercolor program she manipulated the images, zeroing in on the elements she wanted to accent. Then, with an old opaque projector and a printout of her composition, she projected the design onto watercolor paper, lightly sketched it in with pencil, and then began to paint. To speed the process and to keep a fresh eye, O’Neill worked on several pictures at the same time, moving from one to another applying lighter yellows, continuing to build with pinks and blues, until she finished by applying the darkest colors. The whole process is very time consuming for, as she puts it, “I spend 20 hours of working and 20 hours of staring” to insure that the composition, color values, and overall impression are just right.

Christina Pappas O’Neill at work in her Worcester studio.

Not only do the two groups of paintings differ greatly in subject, but O’Neill handles her watercolor technique differently in each as well. In the six Haymarket paintings, she employs the full spectrum to capture the brilliant intensity of a sunny day, highlighting the frenetic activity of the marketplace. The characters appear so animated that you can almost hear their multi-lingual cacophony, particularly in “All Nationalities.” Here we see buyers and sellers from different ethnic backgrounds brought together by common currency — fresh vegetables and cash. In each painting O’Neill masterfully creates different atmospheric settings with subtle washes and highlights. Sunlight bounces off a balding muscleman, a goateed seller’s awning bathes him in cream tones and, in “Blue Lady” a woman under a tarp is seated in a blue haze.

In her larger Elm Park series, O’Neill used a bevy of different techniques to create the feeling of a relaxing afternoon. With a limited palette and careful use of masking, gouache, cotton swabs, and washes, she concentrated on the long shadows of barrels and benches, playing these against the luminous transparency of the overlapping leaves, as in “Girl on a Bike.” Figures in “Running Girl” appear to glow as the late-day sunlight creates a halo effect around them. While most of her pictures have people in them, in “Brooding Bridge” they are absent, allowing us to concentrate on the nearly abstract quality of the late afternoon shadows and the mirror image in the still pond. With paintings that are developed with transparent and translucent images such as these, O’Neill wants to “bring the outside in and fill a room with light.”

The show, at theARTSWorcester Gallery, Quinsigamond Community College, Worcester, runs through May 28. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday, 9 a.m.-noon.