Helen O’Toole is best known for her large-scale abstract oil paintings. She was born in County Mayo, Ireland, where she worked on the family farm and played Irish music. O'Toole studied art in County Sligo and Dublin in the early to mid-eighties. In 1986, she packed her belongings in one suitcase and moved to the United States for adventure and to escape endemic unemployment. O'Toole pursued graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, followed by a summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine.

She participated in residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Bemis Center, Omaha, Nebraska; and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. From 1993 to 1995, she lived in Singapore and taught at LASALLE College of the Arts. She spent a year working in New York and moved to Seattle in 1996 to teach at the University of Washington, where she is currently a Professor of Art. For the past 30 years, she has exhibited in national and international exhibitions.

O’Toole received numerous other awards and research grants, including a Contemporary Northwest Art Award, a Pollock Krasner Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

I am an abstract painter. My paintings relate my experiences and observations of growing up in the west of Ireland in the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. The traces of time evidenced in the landscape of my youth are a repository for our collective memories of the past and its persistent influences on the present: boundaries, control, oppression, trauma, and the insidious rumors surrounding the people I heard about or knew. My paintings consider the often-unspoken harshness of rural life, the people displaced from their homes and land by injustices and cruelty at the hands of an oppressor, and the implications of a post-colonial condition contributing to a generational sense of inadequacy.

Over the past ten years, my paintings have proffered the form and conventions of history painting through color, space, structure, and the materiality of paint. Migration, 2015 memorialized the sufferings of people expelled from their ancestral lands and dwellings and forced to migrate to other places within Ireland as a direct result of English colonization. The declaration “to hell or to Connaught” is attributed to Oliver Cromwell, who enforced mass migration within the country. Connaught (the west of Ireland) was considered inferior and much less desirable than the other three provinces in Ireland. Pirate Queen, 2021, commemorates the sixteenth-century Irish woman known colloquially as Granuaile (Grace O’Malley), whose story embodies the historical and rebellious doggedness of formidable, independent women. Trace, 2021, and Rumor, 2022 deal with persisting stories of hardship that permeate land holdings I was familiar with and their ongoing impact over generations. I frequently use the tropes of romantic landscape painting as a lens to relate to the history of settlement, expansion, and oppression. History painting has often glorified the power of the church, the state, or the painting’s possessor. My paintings instead memorialize the past, paying tribute to my ancestors who worked the land or were displaced. In my paintings, I acknowledge the past and the collective implications of our darker histories, where I lean into potent tropes of historical landscape painting to depict these collective memories. 

Helen O’Toole
December, 2024

Portland Art Museum, OR
Capital One, Richmond, VA
Swedish Hospital, Seattle, WA
Mc Kinsey &CO., Chicago, IL
Amdahl Corporation, Hinsdale, IL
Tuthill Corporation, Hinsdale, IL
National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland
Regional Technical College Sligo, Ireland