Kathleen R. O'Neill Schuler

I begin with a plan, an idea, a structure, something to say – and then I trust good design to carry it. What that comes down to for me, is the space around a thing mattering as much as the thing itself.  Empty space is where the eye rests and the meaning lands in both my visual art and graphic design.

I live and work in Southeast Florida, and my “Hanging Loose” collection images spring from the natural world right outside my door. I work on natural cotton duck, lay down a gesso ground that is part of the design, leaving stretches of raw cloth bare. Over gessoed areas I paint in historical earth pigment oils, and keep some white space open for relief. I then seal the painted passages with a thin skin of cold wax. My canvases aren’t stretched. They hang loose, off hangers I bend myself from wire or sew out of cotton duck. I have spent my life making things for the home, and I see no reason to be locked into someone else’s prepared, square canvas. The whole object is the work: the surface, the image, and the way it hangs on the wall. What I am after is the feeling an old, well-lived interior gives you – patina – a respect for history, for nature, for time passing.

My graphic images are the sharper-edged-cousin – vector illustrations drawn in Adobe Illustrator that nearly always start as drawings.  My painting feeds my applied work, the way it did in the commissioned ten utility box vinyl wraps I designed for the West Palm Beach DDA on Olive Avenue and Banyan Boulevard.