17-21 The 17-21 series offers an abstraction of growing up and the mental and emotional changes young adults go through. The paintings, always done in shades of blue, are a product of Steven Michael O’Connor’s self-imposed re-immersion into the defining cultural aspects of his formative years. Music and photographs serve as a great source of inspiration.
ASSORTED These are individual pieces that have been created off the cuff and do not yet fall into a typical series. Every painting from Steven Michael O’Connor has a reason for it’s creation or a message attached. This is a perfect place to witness the genesis of new compositions and observe how they mature into a series of their own. Steven Michael O’Connor has never made prints or reproductions of his paintings, ensuring that his clients are always receiving a one of a kind investment for their home or office. This inspires him to push the series further with every piece and to avoid a ‘factory’ approach to his artwork.
AUGMENTO The Augmento Series combines the importance of comic books as a form of entertainment with their relevance as high art. Steven Michael O’Connor takes the original concept of the comic and strips away the idealism behind the hero. In doing so, he paints a more realistic portrayal of what a hero living in a human world might act like. Such representations have produced images of Batman getting a DUI, Spiderman disappointing Mary Jane, Dr. Strange losing his temper or Superman overdosing.
BLEACH Bleach is an important series that deals with the bleaching of the world’s coral reefs. Coral reefs are the forests of the sea floor and are habitats for entire ecosystems. Unfortunately our coral reefs are becoming bleached by ocean warming which is a direct result of global warming. When the coral dies out from prolonged bleaching the marine animals that depend on the coral for life disappear. These paintings are an abstraction of different reefs in particular regions of the world’s oceans in hopes to shed light on the global warming. Its clear that man made global warming is having devastating effects on our world and hopefully these paintings highlight an area that we rarely get a chance to see.
DRIPTRONICS The Driptronics Series was inspired by Steven Michael O’Connor’s time spent living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2004. The works reflect the atmosphere present on the streets and sidewalks of the city providing the viewer with an inventive stylization of an urban setting. Steven Michael O’Connor utilizes multi-layers of medium to create an architectural abstraction infused with the controlled drips of graffiti.
DRIZZLE This “controlled drip” style that Steven Michael O’Connor has perfected originated with ‘color bars,’ which is a simple abstraction of early TVs color bars…a homage to the days when our TVs respectfully turned themselves off after a certain hour. The full drip style without the black bars was a result of a commission from a restaurant owner. The hybrids were inspired by the interpretation of a desert’s icing, delineating the similarities that cooking and painting share. Cooking is obviously temporary, but equally as important as the more permanent form of creating.
ELECTRONIC HEROIN Seemingly the most passionate of Steven Michael O’Connor’s works, the Electronic Heroin series addresses the negative aspects of the television industry. After working for several years as a producer, Steven Michael O’Connor became disaffected towards the artificial reality presented by the entertainment industry. The average American spends six hours a day consuming television–this excess is depicted in the painting. The Electronic Heroin series seamlessly incorporates direct text with symbols of television such remote controls, antennas, and static. Steven Michael O’Connor weaves messages into the paintings, effectively warning the viewers about the perils of excessive consumption. The Electronic Heroin series is quickly becoming Steven Michael O’Connor’s most well known body of work.
NEGATIVE The Negative Series does to compound sentences what the Vibration Series did for the singular word. The crisp pallet of these paintings helps create a visceral depiction of language in motion with the focus on the negative space in the piece…bringing the background to life.
PALM The Palm Series represents the irony that exists in Los Angeles life. The paintings reflect the juxtaposition of the beautiful people and places of Southern California, and the materialistic and fake means by which this status quo arose and is maintained. Steven Michael O’Connor uses mixed media such as a photograph of a palm tree transposed on a brightly colored background or sunrise scene.
PHOTO’S SYNTHESIS This cutting-edge style created by Steven Michael O’Connor, documents his creative process by incorporating images of a painting’s creation directly onto the canvas before painting over the photos. This technique imparts the illusion that the piece creates itself. The ‘Synthesis’ style pushes the mixed media in a new direction by repurposing the documentation of the creative process and enabling the viewer to come along for the ride. This is the timeless chicken-or-egg construst applied to art. More a style than a series, each ‘Synthesis’ painting deals with a different theme; from a sincere look at war and destruction to satirical examination of a nation spending its way out of debt. The first piece created with this technique was ‘Wargasm…Supply & Demand’, a vivid 4ft x 8ft piece. Arguably the Pièce de résistance of Steven Michael O’Connor’s career to date, this mixed media painting deals with themes of creation and destruction, and includes nearly every supply imaginable while taking over a full year to create.
PREDATORS The focal point of this chilling series is our planets natural predators. This series explores Mother Nature’s best assassins in an attempt to capture them in their most frightening. These deadly creatures kill to survive and protect, almost justifying their antagonistic behavior, but when Steven Michael O’Connor paints these combative creatures in their element he seems to discover an eerie calculation on the face of a piranha or the predisposition of a great white mid bite, literally painting them with a proclivity for unnecessary violence.
PROTEIN Inspired by electronic microscopic images of proteins, these pieces begin to explore what we put into our bodies on a daily basis. The series has begun to take a strong stance against the industrialization of American food, and how our society has ignored where our food comes from, how it is raised, handled, altered, transported and sold. The styles have radically changed since the inception of the series in the late 90’s however the message remains intact.
THR3′S This series is an abstraction of the idea that things happen in threes.
UNCIVIL The Uncivil Series from Steven Michael O’Connor deals with the stagnation of the Civil Rights movement. The series often display powerful text from Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches about the problems that America faced during the sixties and is still dealing with daily.
VIBRATION Steven Michael O’Connor’s Vibration series presents an innovative visual interpretation of words. Every word is just a vibration until meaning is attached to it in the human brain. This series explores the connection between the vibration of sounds in motion and the meaning associated with the word they represent. Steven Michael O’Connor combines crisp lines with emotive drips to express the image of the meaning behind vibration. Every piece is Steven Michael O’Connor’s visual interpretation of a specific word in vibration form. The word that the artist has chosen to represent is unique to each piece and is only revealed to whomever purchases the painting. The series, thus far, is comprised of ten different styles.
WHEN THESE WORLDS COLLIDE These pieces are aesthetically beautiful images of contention. Each piece is a challenge for the artist to make the struggle beautiful; making light of the endeavor of war by using pastels and atypical ‘soft’ colors to depict brutality. The main goal is to point out the absurdity in the fact that nations are constantly pointing nuclear missiles at each other and that the idea of mutual destruction is acceptable.
