Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Painter Who Defied the Bounds of Abstraction, Dies at 84

"“[The Lampblack paintings] engage with the dialogues around flatness then exemplified by the soak-staining methods of the Color Field paintings,” Lovelace O’Neal told the New York Times in a 2020 interview. “The black pigment paintings were as black as they could be. They can al”"

"“As a young artist living in New York in the 1960s, she found her practice subjected to the critiques of both the Black Arts Movement and the city's avant-garde.”"

"“At the same time, as an MFA student at Columbia University, her gestural works were not impressing Stephen Greene, who had taught Frank Stella and saw a landscape dominated by Minimalists and Color Field painters.”"

"“The aha moment arrived in the aisle of a Lower Manhattan paint shop where she spied a mound of black pigment slowly pooling on the floor through a hole in a paper bag. She duly lugged four bags of lampblack powder back to her Columbia studio.”"

Mary Lovelace O'Neal, an American painter active in the Civil Rights movement, died in Mérida, Mexico, on May 10 at age 84. Over more than 50 years, she created energetic, large-scale paintings with subjects that blurred through layers of rolled and dripping paint. In 1960s New York, her practice faced critiques from both the Black Arts Movement and the city’s avant-garde. Her home with John O’Neal became a hub for Black intellectuals who wanted her work to be more explicit in social politics, while her MFA training at Columbia included criticism from Stephen Greene, who favored Minimalists and Color Field painters. She developed the Lampblack series after discovering lampblack pigment pooling on the studio floor, then applying it to unstretched, unprimed canvases and working back with lines of color.

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