Megan Rooney: 'Painting's dangerous work!' The artist whose tools are brushes and power sanders
By Eliza Goodpasture
I’m just trying to get one step ahead of my paintings,” says Megan Rooney, who is surrounded by the vibrant, gestural abstract works in her studio. She moves through the space restlessly as we chat, rocking on to her tiptoes and arching her arms through the air in an echo of the curving strokes in the paintings. She calls it “dangerous work”, her slow, fraught process of creation. “After a decade of serious painting,” she says, “I still feel bewildered and beguiled.”
Rooney, 40, grew up in Canada and now lives in London, where she is preparing for her forthcoming show at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. She has a unique approach of adding and subtracting. She begins by adding paint to a blank canvas, then removes it with power sanders, then adds more on top, then removes it again, in a painstaking, almost bloody battle to find her way to the finished work. Each painting ends up with 10 or 15 other works beneath it.
“In the beginning of a painting’s life,” she says, “it’s like meeting new people – superficial. Eventually they have something to tell me. In knowing and searching, the work finds its legs.” She seems both tortured and enraptured by the process. Its slowness sets her apart from many abstract painters, who tend to work in a rapid expressionist way. Rooney pushes back at being compared to them. Her paintings are defined by the prolonged accumulation of both paint, she says, and lived experiences, until they become strong enough to stand alone. “I think that if you threw them out of the car on the highway, they’d just sprout legs and walk.”
Most of the works are the same size, matching the wingspan of the average woman, although Rooney does make huge ones too, as well as murals. She refers to the works as “people”, telling me about their personalities and lineages. Heavily influenced by the seasons and the weather, they reflect the colour palette of their surroundings. “The city is my main collaborator,” she says, although her works have a lot in common with much less urban paintings, too. There is a lot of late Monet here, and some of Joan Mitchell’s verdant gestural brushstrokes. (An exhibition bringing Rooney and Mitchell together is open until October at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing.)
