Colleen O’Brien: To Have and To Withhold

Colleen O’Brien presents To Have and To Withhold, an exhibition of earth paintings documenting the watershed of the Rio Grande. O’Brien’s earth paintings reflect a sustained engagement with the geomorphology of the waterways that shaped her childhood and that have historically supported life in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. Moving natural pigment, water, and pastel over canvas secured to a substrate—often a boulder or riverbed—O’Brien composes paintings on-site, en plein air that record the physical surface of earth but also the conceptions of time embedded within these textures: past geological activity, current events, and the future implied by patterns of the past.