Lesley-Ann O’Connell

Lesley-Ann O’Connell’s painting practice is an open and dynamic one. She works fluidly across a range of subject matter and paint applications creating tensions between abstraction and representation, colour and form, surface materiality and pictorial space.  Her studio, in its enthusiastic messiness, becomes a hub for making connections between disparate things, pulling in her fascination with views through windows, causal still-life scenes, flowers, faces, seascapes and rendering them changed, altered, abstracted through obliterating layers, tearing up and re-assembling, collage and stitching, destabilising colour and a natural drive to disrupt her status quo. The space between inspiration, studio processes and changes of direction evaporates and a diverse painterly language opens up and is embraced.

Lesley-Ann O Connell
Rockface, 2025
acrylic on canvas
50 x 40 cm

Images courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

Survey

  • A Warm Distortion, 2025

    acrylic on canvas
    131 x 109 cm

  • Deep Dive, 2019

    oil on canvas
    80 x 80cm

  • Midzones, 2024

    mixed media
    42 x 52 cm

  • Spring Labour, 2021

    oil on canvas
    60 x 50 cm

Biography

Lesley-Ann O’Connell lives and works in County Meath.  She graduated with a BFA in 2008 and an MFA in Fine Art Painting in 2014 from NCAD.

Since then, she has had four solo exhibitions, Afternoon Pieces, Kevin Kavanagh (2025); Yellow Pink and Blue Horizon, Kevin Kavanagh (2022); Midnight Swim, Kevin Kavanagh (2019) and Surface in Motion, Pallas Projects Studios (2015).

Recent group exhibitions include, Pallas 30 Year Anniversary Auction, City Assembly House (2025); SURVEYOR 2025, Solstice Arts Centre; A Splendid Gateway, Rathfarnham Castle (2025); True Colour, Kevin Kavanagh (2025); Moments of Being, Solstice Arts Centre (2025); Magic and Loss, Kevin Kavanagh (2024); SURVEYOR 2024, Solstice Arts Centre (2024); ART WORKS 2023! CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTION, Pallas Projects Studios (2023)

Her work was featured in Artistic Licence for The Gloss magazine (2025)

Awards include The Arts Council Agility Award (2024); Painting Prize at Claremorris Open Exhibition (2017). Public collections include, AXA Insurance, IMACT (FORSA) and OPW- State Art Collection.