At the heart of Ella McVeigh’s practice lies an inquiry into the act of looking—both as an aesthetic experience and as a conceptual framework for painting. Her latest body of work, Something Sonnets, extends this preoccupation, channeling the artist’s fascination with the transient nature of material culture and its echoes in contemporary abstraction. Rooted in a deeply personal engagement with visual stimuli, these paintings emerge from McVeigh’s sustained exploration of surface, composition, and the ways in which images coalesce and dissolve through the painted medium.
In Something Sonnets, McVeigh draws an explicit parallel between painting and poetry. “Sonnets are generally poems of love. These paintings are formed from my yearning to understand the excitement of looking.” Here, love is understood not as a subject but as an approach—an intensity of attention, a sustained engagement with material and image alike. The resulting works carry a sense of reverence, a painterly response to the accumulation of found images and historical fragments that first captivated her at the book fair.
McVeigh’s technique reveals an intuitive play between structure and dissolution. In her Burnish series, a single drawing serves as the generative force behind multiple paintings, much like a poetic refrain that carries variations in meaning through repetition. As she notes, “The Burnish series is made from a drawing that was the starting point of the Burr paintings that we showed at Cork Street. It is a scrap of a drawing, and yet it evokes so many thoughts to do with images. And as you can see from that one starting point, there are so many branching thoughts.” This iterative process, in which a single image unfolds into multiple iterations, resonates with the rhythms of sonnets—structured yet fluid, bound yet expansive.
The two larger paintings in the series, along with their smaller counterparts, retain this logic of accumulation and distillation. McVeigh describes them as “a string of visual ideas surrounding something that I have seen that are brought together into a painting. Those sources are more difficult to pinpoint in words.” This resistance to fixed interpretation, the refusal to dictate meaning, underscores the openness of her practice. Unlike traditional collage, where disparate elements are sutured into a cohesive whole, McVeigh’s paintings remain in flux, allowing form to emerge and recede within layered fields of pigment and gesture.
If early abstraction sought to sever ties with representation in pursuit of a pure visual language, McVeigh reconfigures this history by engaging abstraction as an act of intimate reflection. Her paintings do not impose meaning; they invite it. Something Sonnets articulates a space in which looking itself becomes a form of devotion—a patient, attentive engagement with the shifting possibilities of paint and image alike.
Artists: Ella McVeigh