Rise

Rhea O’Neill’s painting practice is deeply shaped by the beauty of her Northern California surroundings, where vivid panoramas and gentle light offer a rich landscape from which she draws color and form. Her work reflects a lifelong fascination with an imagined animal existence—creatures rendered with their own agency, navigating a world transformed by human influence. Within her paintings, nature emerges as a wild, slightly unknowable force that humanity continually attempts to shape, control, or confine. The animals she depicts are often constrained by the roles humans impose upon them rather than following their own natural instincts, creating an intentional tension between autonomy and captivity. O’Neill also engages with themes of environmental degradation, depicting discarded waste and pollution that animals are forced to cohabit with, highlighting the contradictions and consequences of human impact on the natural world.