ABOUT

Emily Kngwarreye once said that by the age of eighty-three she had spent eighty years observing and three years painting. This resonates with Mac Connell’s own artistic trajectory which he resumed in 2021. Connell had studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in the 1970’s, but his commitment to evolving as an artist persisted throughout the following decades, even though farming and construction projects intervened. He has since been making large scale paintings in his Geelong studio. These works, often prepared as diptych or triptych, are dynamic, richly coloured and thickly layered oil or acrylic over under-drawings in an expressive gestural style. They are based on figurative images, the intersections of colour, emotion and automatic sensations, and the impressionistic fleeting moment. Connell's narratives dance intuitively between the active and passive, between landscapes, sumptuous and buoyant themes, though sometimes dark and violent ones, to the sensual shapes of bodies, all harvested from subliminal memories and personal experience.

Having travelled, observed and regularly visited art galleries throughout the world as well as locally, his aesthetic style brings together a wealth of observation distilled from places like the Kimberley, aerial views of ravines, rivers, mountains and the lines of Country, as well as from artists he admires, including Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, Jean Dubuffet, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Between 2003 and 2019, Connell studied privately with one of Australia’s great abstract expressionist artists, Yvonne Audette, whose mentorship profoundly shaped his understanding of mark-making and the musicality and calligraphic rhythm of the gestural composition. Importantly, Audette believed that one needs to be able to draw to paint, even if one’s paintings are abstract, and Connell’s drawing skills are an integral part of his paintings.

By late 2025 Connell’s paintings have a certain urgency that qualifies his long-awaited re-emergence as an artist. His remarkable body of work rewards the gestational years of looking and learning and distilling his aesthetic direction. His paintings invite multiple readings and continue to evolve toward a more open and poetic form of abstraction, containing a spectrum of ideas that are continually condensed while referencing both vulnerability and mystery.

Dr Sheridan Palmer, independent art historian and curator.

CV

Born 1955 in Melbourne, Australia. Early years spent on the family farm at Conargo in the Riverina.

Resides and works in Geelong, Australia.

EDUCATION

1973/1974 Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia.

Studied painting under abstract artists Allan Mitelman and Paul Partos.

2003–2019 – Private life drawing studies with the abstract expressionist painter Yvonne Audette in Melbourne, Australia.

STUDIO

2021-to present. Studio in Newtown, Geelong, Australia.

EXHIBITIONS

2023 – Private Preview at artist’s studio.

COLLECTIONS

Works in private collections :

Melbourne, Australia; London, UK; Hamilton, New Zealand; Macedon Ranges, Australia; Sunshine Beach, Australia; Adelaide, Australia.