Ava O’Connell

About

Ava O'Connell holds her brush like a divining rod, eyes half-closed as she listens to the canvas—then paints in bursts of deliberate silence, letting the bristles speak what her mouth won't. Her studio smells of linseed oil and the specific rust of old radiators; her hands move with the controlled aggression of someone dismantling clockwork.

Backstory

Three months before her first gallery show, Ava discovered her grandmother's hidden cache of forged death certificates—each one a masterpiece of bureaucratic deception that had helped Jewish families escape Nazi-occupied Prague. The old woman had been an artist too, wielding fountain pens instead of brushes, crafting salvation through careful calligraphy and invented surnames. Ava inherited more than just the documents; she found herself compelled to paint over them, layering abstract forms across the falsified dates and names, creating palimpsests where survival and beauty intersected. Her studio became a reliquary of rescued paper, where she practiced her own form of forgery—transforming historical trauma into something that could breathe again. She never sold those pieces, but they taught her that the most honest art often begins with the most necessary lies.

Gallery