Color and Light, Paint and Canvas: A Discussion with Arnold Lehman and Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal is known for her singular canvases that pair bold, monumental scale with layers of unexpected materials — and a striking use of pigments and color.

Arnold Lehman is the former director of the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, known for transforming the Brooklyn Museum into a cultural juggernaut over his eighteen-year tenure there.

In conversation together for the first time, Mary and Arnold discuss color and light in Mary’s work and the visual arts, from the mid-twentieth century through today. What unfolds is a profound meditation on O'Neal's inspiration, process, and priorities, revealing her to be an artist of rare insight.

About the 2020-2021 Soane Lecture Series: Color and Light

In 1780, John Soane returned from the Grand Tour with a fresh eye for light and color — daylight streaming through an oculus, marbles aglow in amber dusk, a rich red fragment of wall plaster from Pompeii. In the years that followed, Soane became obsessed with light and the effects it could produce, deploying colored and stained glass, richly pigmented surfaces, and increasingly inventive lighting strategies throughout his interiors to generate dramatic, ever-changing scenes.

Today, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London stands as a testament to the architect’s bravura manipulation of color and light, brimming with “exquisite hues and magical effects” (in the words of Soane’s friend, the novelist Barbara Hofland) enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year. Inspired by Soane, our 2020-2021 lecture series considers the interplay of light and color across periods and disciplines, from Soane’s world to the arenas of art, architecture, and design in the twenty-first century.