Maureen O’Leary: Distilling Ambiguity

By Hayley Ferber 

As a participant in the group exhibition Influencers at Cristin Tierney Gallery, Maureen O’Leary embodies influence as the quiet transmission of visual language across time, history, and community. Her featured painting, Night Tide Pool, carries a sense of playful curiosity edged with subtle unease, hinting at the mystery that lingers beneath acts of looking and exploration. Across her practice, O’Leary investigates how images hold emotion, memory, and narrative without resolving into fixed stories. Her work asks us to slow down, see differently, and inhabit visual space as a site where feeling is transmitted through form, color, and composition. 

Her paintings—often marked by vertical formats, simplified forms, and luminous yet unconventional color—hover between figuration and abstraction. O’Leary constructs many of her landscapes as composites, drawing from photographs, pencil sketches, and memory, assembling large, flattened shapes into spaces that feel at once familiar and unplaceable. These works are not depictions of specific sites but distilled environments: open-ended spaces that invite projection while remaining emotionally charged. 

Color plays a central expressive role. O’Leary’s use of heightened, sometimes improbable palettes pushes scenes toward a hyper-real, dreamlike register. Echoes of Post-Impressionism and Cubism appear in her nuanced color relationships and shifting spatial perspectives, while a subtle surrealism emerges through atmosphere and ambiguity—it is often unclear whether we are witnessing dawn or dusk, presence or absence. 

Ultimately, O’Leary’s work explores intersubjectivity—the shared emotional space between artwork and viewer. By reducing detail and generalizing form, she creates room for personal memory and association. Recurring motifs—landscapes, cars, clouds, moons, and architectural fragments—act as quiet stand-ins for human experience: a parked car suggests longing or transition; a hovering moon evokes solitude, time, or wonder. Light falling across a surface or an expansive sky becomes a narrative catalyst rather than a conclusion. 

In this way, O’Leary’s paintings do not tell stories so much as provide a point of departure. They offer viewers a place to pause, to feel their way through ambiguity, and to recognize their own emotional landscapes reflected in color, shape, and space. Her work reminds us that influence can be gentle yet lasting—an invitation to see differently, and to share in the quiet, persistent exchange between image and observer.