Francesca O'Malley
I was born in Brooklyn, in 1953, have lived in various part of New York City, all my life, and live here still. I attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School as a child, which nurtured my love for art. Growing up around creative people—a father who wrote poetry (and taught me about typography), and and uncle who was an architect, added to my view of the world as place where you make can make things, sometimes beautiful and sometimes useful. I studied piano into my twenties, and continue to play now, on an excellent digital piano. During my college years, I attended Pratt Institute as a painting major, but probably did an equal amount of printmaking while an undergraduate. I received my BFA in 1976, and an MFA in painting in 1979. After graduate studies were complete, I married a fellow alumnus, a photographer with whom I had two children—a son, and a transgender daughter. Eventually, I became single again and had to abandon my creative work to support my children, with the aim of seeing them through their education, and nurture their development as good, ethical people. The role of mother never ends, once you have made that commitment. The world of care and concern does not fade, even after they have left home. Fortunately, I found employment in the publishing world, which was friendly to women during the 1990s and onward, became a book designer and eventually earned the title of Art/Design Director. I am grateful for this experience and exposure to technological tools, computers, and software, which now help me with background tasks in my current quest to make art again. A second marriage to a scientist a few years ago, has been the source of many interesting conversations concerning the nature of reality, string theory, the multiverse, and so on. These discussions help to inform my current work, much of which is concerned with bringing together elements which cannot really exist together, in a kind of deconstructed realism. For me, it is important to be able to have the mental space to focus on my art. If I have too many other overriding concerns, I become nervous and unable to concentrate. For many years, I’ve been missing my practice, but within the past decade or so, I’ve been able to get back to it with great energy and a real sense of purpose. I know I am getting older but to quote the actress and inventor Hedy Lamar, I feel I should “Do it anyway.”.
