ROBYN O'NEIL

The Unmoored

2014

Graphite and oil pastel/paper,

13 5/8 x 14 15/16 in. Sheet, 15 3/4 x 17 1/16 in. Frame

In The Unmoored, from the exhibition I Burned Waves, Robyn O’Neil distills the landscape into a site of both material and emotional transformation. Rendered in powdered graphite and oil pastel, the work depicts a suspended, indistinct mass adrift within a pale, atmospheric field. The composition evokes weather, erosion, and the passage of time, yet resists narrative resolution; creating an image caught between formation and dissolution.

This body of work marks an early phase in O’Neil’s sustained engagement with the sublime forces of nature and their psychological resonance. By setting aside the human figure, O’Neil allows the landscape itself to bear the weight of emotional expression. The surface is built through cycles of smudging, erasure, and reapplication; embodying the tension between creation and erasure that habituates much of her later practice.

In its restraint and ambiguity, The Unmoored recalls both the poetic abstraction of early American modernists such as Milton Avery and Arthur Dove and the emotional gravitas of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic landscapes. Like Friedrich, O’Neil transforms the natural world into a mirror for states of isolation and transcendence. Yet her vision remains distinctly contemporary: her sublime is one of uncertainty, where beauty and devastation coexist in delicate equilibrium.

The Unmoored thus extends O’Neil’s sustained meditation on the transformative power of nature, capturing a world in flux. The work articulates a contemporary vision of the sublime: one rooted in impermanence, introspection, and the inexorable cycles of destruction and renewal that define both the natural and emotional landscape.

Seen in relation to subsequent projects such as An Unkindness (2019) and American Animals (2022), The Unmoored anticipates O’Neil’s deepening preoccupation with the interplay of destruction and renewal, and the fragile boundary between human interiority and natural vastness. The work articulates an early vision of the sublime as both destructive and redemptive: a world perpetually remade through loss and transformation.