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| Young Girl | Moongirl Resting By A River |
1913 - 2004
A landscape painter in oil and watercolour, wood engraver and lithographer. Born in Leicester, the son of Vernon Feargus O’Connor, the instrument maker. After studying at Leicester College of Art (1931-33), he went on to become a pupil of Ravilious and Nash at the Royal College of Art in the 1930s, particularly admiring the ‘clean-cut viality’ of Ravilous’s engravings. In 1936 Ravilious introduced him by letter to Christopher Sandford at the Golden Cockerel Press.
During war service in the RAF O’Connor’s engravings for Owen Rutter’s "We Happy Few" reached Sandford by field post. This led on to many further commissions for book illustration. It was by means of these wood engravings and also gouache paintings that O’Connor earned much of his reputation over the next 20 years - leading most recently to his regularly commissioned engravings featured each month in a column in The Oldie.
In 1949 O’Connor moved to East Anglia to take up a post as principal of the Colchester School of Art, where he persuaded John Nash to come and teach. He persistently warned students against being carried away by the ‘niggle bug’ of niggly details and scratchy engraving. One student created such a bug to hang in the studio as a caution.
In the early 1970s, he left Colchester to move to a converted bothy in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, seeking the wildness which was fast disappearing from the Suffolk countryside. He also undertook a visiting lectureship at Glasgow School of Art.
Always heavily influenced by medieval art, especially Gothic stained glass, manuscript illustrations and painting of the 14th and 15th Centuries. O'Connor was also inspired by the works of Munch, Lucas Cranach, Wright of Derby and Murillo. As well as engravings, he produced his own stained glass window designs (for the Betton Memorial window in St Mary’s, Hadleigh) and painted many watercolours as well as powerfully coloured, slightly abstract oils. He said that watercolour should be experienced as a ‘taste’, giving ‘the sense of a thirst being quenched, as if by a pool of water on a long and tiring walk’.
His work is held in permanent collections at the New York public library, Columbia University and the public galleries of Oxford and Cambridge. He also wrote and illustrated his own books: Canal Barges and People and A Pattern of People.
Exhibitions Include:
Zwemmer Gallery; New Grafton Gallery; Royal Academy; Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour; New Grafton Gallery; Clare College, Cambridge