By The Same Sea, Homes of The Irish Diaspora

Printed catalog from By the Same Sea a 2023 solo exhibition at the Custom House Gallery, Westport, Ireland of small paintings of Long Island by Maureen O’Leary. The catalog includes installation images, images of the work exhibited, and additional works in this series by O’Leary.

In these works O’Leary takes a single theme —light and shadow on the small homes of suburban Long Island, New York where she lives and works—as the basis for formal experimentation with paint. Completed over a decade, O’Leary now reflects on this body of work as an echo of the Irish diaspora to America and the symbol of home and cottage as the effigies of new life.

In the catalog essay Irish-American poet Michael Whelan writes “Little wonder that twilight along the sea of the north shore of Long Island may waken in resonance a sense of spirit worlds intuitive in these paintings and their metaphorical private world of perceptions -- their sense of same sea shared far away with the West of Ireland.”