Aleda O’Connor’s vibrant pastels shed light on Hamilton’s industrial landscape

Many paintings of Hamilton’s industrial landscape are grey and gritty. But, that’s not how Aleda O’Connor paints local steel mills and smokestacks. She takes the grey away.

“The varied greys in the buildings pointed to the saturated colours I chose, so I took direction from that,” she says. “Eventually I began to play with colour for its own sake, but always expressed it in the actual structure of the buildings, weather and vapour around them.”

O’Connor’s work is on show in Industry, an engaging exhibition at Earls Court Gallery. She’s been exhibiting locally and internationally for more than 25 years, and has taken on a variety of subjects, including local landscapes and totally awesome pastoral-type landscapes inhabited by woolly sheep. Her paintings have been used on the sets of several TV series.

O’Connor grew up in Toronto. When she moved to Hamilton 10 years ago, the city’s industrial sites caught her eye.

“It’s impossible to ignore the industrial shoreline, which is so integral to Hamilton’s identity,” she says. “So many people, who cross the skyway but have never actually visited Hamilton, understand the urban landscape here to be all about industry. It demanded attention.”

O’Connor’s style is painterly; that is, shapes such as buildings are soft-edged, often coming across as having the same airy and fluid shapes as sky, water, steam and smoke. Working with pastels, she layers and blends colours, building up a vibrant surface that approaches abstraction.

Her industrial paintings — she refers to her pastels as paintings — are based on what she sees as she drives and walks in Hamilton and Burlington. Some of her favourite places include Hamilton Harbour, Eastport Drive, LaSalle Park and Bayshore Park on North Shore Boulevard.

Many of her views are of Stelco and Dofasco buildings seen from across the water. But O’Connor transforms these views into harmonious arrangements of shape, colour and line.

Mauves, greens and blues take over “Reflection,” aptly named since water and its reflections take up more than half of the composition. Barely there buildings rise behind a pile of coal. O’Connor unites the disparate elements with an overall pattern of cross-hatching and thin, scribbly lines.

In “Flare,” verticals and diagonals from roofs and smokestacks compete for attention. Patches of yellow complement the mauves and purples. And a few tiny strokes of bright yellow and orange on the right add a small visual surprise.

O’Connor makes sketches on-site to record what she sees, but there’s more to them than that.

“Everything is based on observation. The sketches are a way to understand what I am looking at, to sort out shapes, hues and values, especially when I am translating the greys into colours.”

“Cranes, Orange” is energized by a liberal use of oranges and reds. Three emphatic diagonals cut across the painting and turn rectangles into triangles and parallelograms.

In “Blue Stack,” rich blues and greens turn a nighttime industrial site into a magical place. A lone vertical forces its way upward. O’Connor reduces the structures to rectangles and squares, and the sky to arcs.

“I am very interested in how weather and light transform our perception of landscape and place,” she says. “A light fog flattens a view and mutes colour, and light shining through a cloud of vapour makes a bright halo.

“When rain, snow or vapour veil the mills and smokestacks, parts of them vanish. At night, the lights and flares, especially when seen from across the water, alter the view into something entirely different again.”

Aleda O’Connor

What: Industry

Where: Earls Court Gallery, 215 Ottawa St. N.

When: extended until June 18

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday

Website: earlscourtart.com

Phone: 905-527-6685

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