Tessa Greene O’Brien

A Maine native, Tessa Greene O’Brien (born 1982) is an artist and curator based in South Portland. She received a BS degree in fine art from Skidmore College and an MFA from the Maine College of Art and Design. O’Brien has shown throughout the United States, including recent exhibitions at Platform Project Space, Brooklyn; Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles; Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland; Buoy Gallery, Kittery; Sears Peyton Gallery, New York City; Studio E Gallery, Seattle; and the GCenter for Maine Contemporary Art. She was a 2022–23 Residential Fellow at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College; her other residencies include Surf Point, Tides Institute, Monson Arts, Haystack, Hewnoaks, Vermont Studio Center, Joseph A Fiore Art Center, and Stephen Pace House. Grants and awards include the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Ellis Beauregard Foundation, the Maine Arts Commission, the Joseph. A. Fiore Painting Prize, the St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award, and the Kindling Fund at SPACE gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice is centered around themes of love, perception, and a sense of place. I make autobiographical paintings using imagery from personal snapshots and family photos from my rural Maine childhood. Working in traditions of observation and storytelling, I seek and paint the stories embedded in the landscape.

My paintings are colorful in a sun-faded way, and I use techniques such as staining, dyeing, and invented color to convey a hazy perceptual state that mimics my memory. I retain painterly portions of the initial fast composition, then selectively render certain imagery with detailed clarity. I am interested in the tension between picture and paint, working towards moments where the image dissolves and the formal and physical qualities of the paint coalesce. 

Painting from observation is a self-imposed parameter that challenges me to notice, and to engage in an ongoing triangulation between myself, my surroundings, and the history of painting.