ABOUT THE ARTIST

Connie Connally

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Education

MFA - Southern Methodist University  2004
BFA - Wichita State University (Magna Cum Laude) 1975
Oklahoma University 1970-73

 
 

Connie Connally paints stunning canvases of complex elegance, with imagery that merges harmoniously and nearly completely both representational reference and powerful abstraction. Connally’s poetic colorscapes, with their expressive brushwork, sweeping gestural marks and animated cadence, reflect the artist’s passion for distilling the essence of her observations of nature and situate her work as the vital interplay between memory and imagination. Her palette of organic color and calligraphic brushstroke combine to serve as imprint of the artist’s profound love of being in nature and the desire that her painting reflect both her exterior and interior experience of it.

Citing Joan Mitchell as an important influence on her work, Connally employs exuberant, impassioned colors laid on her canvases in a pictorial strategy that teeters between the action painting of her abstract expressionist forebears and a more refined personal style that modulates the strokes and dabs that comprise her surfaces. Her layers of brushstroke read less as agitated ruptures and more like intuitive, sensual experiences rendered as prismatic atmospheres of color and tone. Rich, multi-layered surfaces of color morph, coalesce and scatter in quietly energetic rhythms that evoke the experience of being surrounded by nature.

Connally’s works have been exhibited extensively across the United States and included in museum and private collections internationally including The Grace Museum, Longview Museum of Fine Art, The Art Museum of South Texas, Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Wildling Museum of Art & Nature, and Southern Methodist University. 

Ken Marvel, co-owner LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM writes of Connally