About

Eileen O’Kane Kornreich is a New York-based visual artist creating artwork for over forty-five years. She works in mixed-media drawings, painting in oil, watercolor, and acrylic, and various disciplines of printmaking. Presently she employs colored graphite and pencils under and over watercolor, acrylic paints, and inks on canvas, having laid a ground that gives a paper-like feel to mark-making methods. This allows for medium and color layering engaging the form’s intended movement and abstraction.

Born in 1955, Eileen O’Kane Kornreich’s work has been subject to a multiplicity of shifts and explorations that transpire through the multifacetedness of her works today while confirming the historicity of her artistic practice. Despite the evolution in Eileen’s use of color and subject, what remained consistent throughout her practice has always been her hand. Rough and decisive layers of swirls, lines, and cuts collide, intersect, or parallel each other to immortalize the distinct movement and mood of the depicted figures. Rather than figuratively exploring the outside, Eileen’s practice makes visible internal energies that we are often restrained from seeing. The visibility of the artistic process not only valorizes hints of past versions but, most importantly, marks their evolution as they stand altered and worn by time, mirroring the interplay of expression and experience that define portraits. The physical energy used in the process of heavily stroking and consuming the graphite on the paper transforms the practice into a performance that resembles the internal energy searched for in the depicted figures.  The apparent rapidity of Eileen’s brushstrokes deceives the viewer into perceiving her practice as an equally fast one; however, waiting defines her process while validating the historicity of her practice. Although the process initiates with a strong urgency to transfer the image from the mind to the canvas, it is interrupted by multiple pauses that allow her to “socialize” with the work, making it become part of her life. Looking, listening, and contemplating her works enables Eileen to conceptualize and shape its future.

Eileen is a White Columns Artist Registry and Equity Gallery member. In 2021-22 she created unique artist books and hand-built ceramic sculptures as part of her Bridge 3 series of oil paintings and multi-media scroll drawings. Exhibitions in 2021-22 have included Kornreich’s one-hundred-foot drawing performance during Warren Neidich’s Swept Away, Love Letter to a Surrogate(s), Guild Hall (East Hampton, NY), Dumbo Open Studios (Brooklyn, NY) LongHouse Reserve (East Hampton, NY) The Re Institute (Millerton, NY) and Julie Keyes Galleries (Sag Harbor, NY.) Her recent work is featured on the White Columns Curated Artist Registry. She has participated in residencies with various art organizations, including Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, 2022 FL, ChaNorth, Pine Plains, NY, 2021, The Watermill Center, Watermill, NY, 2019 and the School of Visual Arts, New York, 2019. The artist studied at the New York Studio School, Art Students League, and the School of MFA Boston.