About Artist

Born in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1965, I studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art and lived and worked in the capital city until moving to Barcelona to complete a Master’s degree in Contemporary European Fine Art; I had my first solo show in 1989. After 16 years of professional life in Harstad, Northern Norway, I now live and work in the region of Sierra de Libar, Spain and Edinburgh, Scotland. "O'Donnell makes work, all of which are gradually evolving. The shifts that appear from one series to the next are painfully undramatic, but each new painting builds on those that have gone before in a subtle but constant progression. As Spanish Canta-brian artist, Juan Usle wrote “. . . each work tells you something about what you are trying to do.” Each work is a word in O’Donnell’s story." The work is about limitation, duplication and repetition. The palette is monochrome; shades of grey. The materials are restricted to oil, graphite and charcoal on Irish linen and paper. The marks area variation on a horizontal line, reflecting geological strata and family generations. The physical process is the constrained, monotonous movement of repetitive mark-making in a series of work, repeated over a twenty-year period. The theory is 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.' Heraclitus of Ephesus