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Jane O'Neill

@onejanem

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LA, based
artist
there’s always something on my face

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pulling
2025
acrylagouache & chalk on salvaged pink linen
11x14 inches
#pulling #painting by @onejanem

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a year ago

head of a king seen in a gorgeous jewel-toned show on Ancient Thrace at the Getty Villa last year. I’ve been describing the recent paintings to visitors as compressed dioramas, w inks soaking into the fabric and sand and glitter sitting on the surface, the image is encased in the object-like presence of the fabric-wrapped stretchers. sorry to get artspeaky shh shh let’s just look and you can pet the fuzzy edges.

head of a Thracian king, 2026, acrylagouache with Sumi ink, spray paint and sand on salvaged green faux suede, 12x20 inches by @onejanem

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8 months ago

I made this fuzzy little auto-portrait recently to commemorate reaching a certain age + becoming ungovernable, bc usually when that happens, society wants you to disappear. my advice to you, my wymn, is don’t. get down to your unsexy skin-toned skivvies, start taking HRT + start talking really fucking loudly about all the things that are no longer tolerable like so many women have done on socials this past week. because we’ve been too accommodating to the system and have not done enough to honor the women who came before us. It broke my heart to hear a Guerrilla Girl speak at an event a few months ago about how she was a part of an important protest 40 years ago and felt like not much has changed since.

things have changed.

things still need to change.

will I delete this post + angry screed later? nah. I’m gonna leave it up as a reminder to myself + make sure I’m doing enough for women, kids, marginalized + vulnerable ppl everywhere.

what will you do?

auto-portrait, HRT, acrylagouache on repurposed microsuede, 11x14 inches #guerillagirls @guerrillagirls 🙏🖤🤘 #advantagesofbeingawomanartist by @onejanem

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15 days ago

the nice thing about a painting is that it simultaneously can mean many different things at once depending on the viewer. It lives in the present with you, with its personal histories in tow, and it will move on to wherever it’s going without you, staying ever the same and yet also changing with each reading and the way people read. that last part is what should keep you up at night and fighting for a future in which art remains truly readable, where multiple truths can be held in developed minds at once, and not smashed into one flat earth meaning. The people who want one explanation for things are filled with anxiety and you don’t have to let it take over, here or anywhere else.

Come and hug this fuzzy red accidental allegory in LAST CALL FOR AMERICA at Free Parking Space, Sat 10/3, 3-6pm, love America and all its mess, and go watch Peacemaker for a great moving portrait (a talking picture) of our contemporary landscape.

This opening @free_parking_space is on the ground floor of @mohilef_studios and is happening simultaneously (theme) w their amazing open studios event.

middle finger monument to the bicentennial babies, 2026, bleach, acrylagouache, Sumi ink, sand, glitter, metallic acrylics on red reclaimed velvet, 26 x 32 inches #eagly #cozyhorror by @onejanem

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a month ago

Xmas in hell I mean collapse I mean July haha ok bye

acrylagouache, acrylic metallic paint, Sumi ink + bleach on red velvet, 12x16 in. ❤️🎄🍬 by @onejanem

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3 months ago

im sure this is a prob sculpture of a goddess and a broken dismembered putti clinging to her hip and there’s some lovely myth to accompany it, but for me, this casually taken image haunted me. museums used to feel like holy places to me. they still do, even if it’s often a showcase of who won in the telling of history. I know. And this is a world of mothers, children, and bystanders on repeat, for infinity. My studio door just blew shut as I typed this. 💀

from somewhere inside the Getty villa, 2026
acryla gouache on salvaged micro suede, 11x14 in. by @onejanem

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4 months ago

guys it was really hot here this week.

and everything continues to be insane.

this one is just big enough to dip a toe in, and one of the first velvet paintings I made last year. I loved the quiet sadness of this image: a small pool evacuated right before a summer storm, based on a vacation pic from a family reunion in 2019. a lifetime of concerns ago… anyway, paintings are strange bc they can be so silly or sad or small, yet hold so much. this guy is fuzzy and stiff in places, an object and also a picture and and and…

longing for simpler sadnesses (wish you were here!), 2025, bleach, acrylagouache, spray paint, and Sumi ink on reclaimed grey velvet, 10x10 inches by @onejanem

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7 months ago

happy (?!) #internationalwomensday

for the girls, women, dolls, mothers, daughters, sisters, aunties, cousins, nieces, friends, teachers, queens: this world don’t turn without you. it doesn’t *anything* without you. don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

here’s a sketch from a few months back of a delightful afternoon spent amongst women and kiddo friends at the Norton Simon. (and ftr ballet requires insane artistry and physical grit and is something that has been feminized and therefore marginalized, so maybe someone (idk, his name rhymes w ballet actually) w box office millions should apologize and look to fund the arts, bc that’s something our country does not do well on its own in comparison to Europe let’s say…)

(untitled, tbd), 2025, acrylic on cardboard, 8 x 11.5 inches by @onejanem

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7 months ago

I have worked on this one on and off for the past few months, struggling with the various expressions that came across her face (and you know, all of what we’re experiencing…) and felt this one best fit the moment we are in. Weariness, despair, maybe, but perhaps we are seeing a state of transition and recharging. A new baby snake grows from a lock of her hair as these lozenge-like shapes of light — mothers—come to the mouth of her brick cave with their babies in tow. Mothers are coming. We are the mothers.

According to Greek mythology, Medusa was pregnant at the time of her demise. And there is this idea that Medusa wasn’t cursed by Athena, but that the two figures are one and the same (h/t on Magick & Alchemy podcast + made incredible sense to me). Also shared on that podcast episode was the idea that Medusa is derived from the North African triple goddess Tanit, so I think it’s also incumbent upon us to reflect on the geographical proximities of where these myths arose, how cultures inform one another, how these dominating myths may be viewed as appropriations or erasures since western culture has strongly favored Greek and Roman influences.

An interpretation I am also sitting with is Nikita Gill’s poem Medusa to Athena, in which she describes Athena bestowing protection and power onto Medusa by turning her into a goddess after the violation she experiences.

The symbol of Medusa has been used in apopotraic magic as protection. I have been using lines of sand as protection in some of my paintings and here, the lines of sand live between the bricks, holding everything together. There is also sand in the light coming to empower Medusa. the picture can hold various reads, along with our fierce love and rage for survivors.

mothers are coming, 2026, Sumi and acrylic inks, acryla gouache, sand, gifted glitter and spray paint on reclaimed velvet, 16x20 inches

#medusa #athena #tanit #mothers #nikitagill << go to @nikita_gill and learn about her work if you’re not yet familiar by @onejanem

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8 months ago

We visited the Getty Villa for the first time on January 4th, 2025, just a couple of days before wildfires devastated parts of Altadena, the Palisades, and parts of Malibu surrounding this museum. here are just a few of the 15 and counting little paintings I’ve made from that visit. I’m still researching so much of what I saw and learned on that day, but also constantly reflecting on how it was all preserved during a terrible event, when so many lost so much immediately beyond the borders of the museum grounds and across the city near our home. The third painting is a sketch of a sand castle my kids built that day on Carbon Beach. The private property in the background where we soaked in the end of a perfect winter day in Southern California was demolished by the fires.

sending love to all who are rebuilding, who are still trying to find time to recover amidst the new obstacles emerging seemingly every day. we are finding out we are so much stronger than we realized, and we will have to become ever moreso as another new year begins.

tree in winter, Getty Villa, 2025, acrylagouache on salvaged fabric, 8x14 in.

boy reclining in fountain (fr idk what it’s called I’ll come back and edit), Getty Villa, 2025, acrylagouache on salvaged fabric, 11x14 in.

Carbon Beach, Malibu, 2025, acrylic on gessoed chipboard, 12x20? Idk

#malibu #gettyvilla #wildfires by @onejanem

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9 months ago

it’s been a year of letting paint be paint, and painting until paint turns into something else. what a foreshadowing of a fcked up year this dark January portrait of last year’s Christmas tree holds. I made a bunch of paintings this year (a lot, this was a seismic shift in my Swiss army man studio practice), a few of them good, all of them amidst local, national, and global destabilizing mess, the sudden loss of a dear friend and also a beloved uncle. I’m 💯ready to shed the year of the snake.

for mood shift, I added🎶 bc @rob.oneill and the smaller kid sing some of the lyrics to this as “face of a monkey with a fire in its eyes….” 😂❤️

Ex mass, 2025, acrylagouache on found black backing board, 12x16 inches by @onejanem

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10 months ago