A committed on-site painter, my most recent body of work is based primarily on two areas I have been painting for many years; Blairstown, New Jersey and the Gowanus Canal area of Brooklyn; one under cover of darkness, the other under a blanket of snow. Black and white. Familiar locations totally changed.

The physical challenges and demands of painting en plein air are very much the draw for me, taken further this time by the logistics of painting in the dead of night or in the depths of winter. Blairstown is where I go to paint countryside, and Brooklyn is where I go to paint industry and architecture. The two places might seem quite different, but in fact, the painting experience for me is about knowing and understanding what is in front of me and finding an interesting configuration of shapes and colors, a way to make sense of the world. No matter that I look at the same frozen pond day after day or even from morning to afternoon. The familiarity of the known place has its allure, but the wonder is that it never repeats. The paintings are quick, of necessity, but come from more than a decade of standing and painting in the same spots, and coming to a slow understanding of a place.

My home is minutes from the Gowanus canal, and my studio overlooks it. Many times a day, every day I cross the metal bridges that span the canal. For many years I have stood on those bridges by day, slowly getting to know in paint every color of every building, the sounds of the industry and the murk that is the water. Knowing it so well by day I wondered what it would be to leave all that information behind and see what happens at night. It is a whole other world, silent and still. It is a challenge to get to know a place and then to leave that knowledge behind and see it anew in the darkness and to translate that knowing into paint.

Simplicity has always been a goal, to pare things down to an essence, to eliminate detail in pursuit of a more abstract arrangement of shapes. Night allows that. Masses are kept simple and flat, with an emphasis on geometry, color and composition. Alternately snow covers everything with a blanket of white. The familiar landscape disappears and is transformed to black and white. Clear blue shadows slide diagonally across the white snow, making a counterpoint to the bare, black, vertical trees of winter. And the pond changes in color from black, to frozen white, to blue.

Elizabeth O Reilly received her MFA from Brooklyn College, New York, and her B.Ed from the National University of Ireland. She has participated in residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation, Ireland, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming and the Ragdale Foundation, Illinois, and has received a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. A documentary on her work was shown on the Irish TV network, TG4 in 2002.