Megan Rooney: Seductive Color
By Laura Heyrman
“All painting is about storytelling. I feel the act of painting connects me to the oldest parts of humanity. Telling stories is a central part of the human condition. This impulse to leave a trace, to make a mark, to say I was here.” – Megan Rooney (Canadian, b. 1985)
London-based Canadian artist Megan Rooney has been making her mark through painting over the last decade and the world is taking notice. Her most recent work is the subject of a current solo show in London and she is also paired with the great Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell (LINK) in an exhibition in Beijing. Like her predecessor, Rooney builds on the traditions of Lyrical Abstraction (LINK) and Action Painting (LINK). Working on a large scale and depending on color and gesture to convey stories based on her own experiences and emotions, Rooney has evolved a highly individualistic approach.
“You spend your life as a painter developing a relationship to color and then testing the limits of that relationship. It’s radical, it’s ever-changing – it can submit to you and it can betray you. It always seduces, always excites.” – Megan Rooney
As a child, Rooney, who was born in South Africa, lived in Brazil before her family moved to Canada. The young artist was drawn to color and began creating murals on the exterior walls of the suburban Canadian home which here mother had painted bright pink. As she grew up, Rooney regularly repainted her room in new colors, wanting to discover what is was like to sleep in and live with each one.
This passionate relationship with color continues to drive her work as a painter. She works on groups of paintings at the same time, perceiving them as members of a family and experiencing them as characters with emotional connections and rivalries. She moves from one painting to another as the compositions develop, using an electric sander to excavate through the layers of material, uncovering old color relationships and building new ones. This can be a time-consuming process as Rooney must wait for each paint layer to dry before attacking it with the sander. She has developed a technique using four materials: acrylic paint, oil paint, pastels, and oil stick (oil paint in a crayon form). Each provides a different physical and color quality to the artist’s variegated surfaces. Using the sander forces the color to be absorbed into the support and underlying layers, an effect that the artist prizes for its ability to “wound or penetrate” the viewer’s emotions.
“The painting develops its own personhood, it starts to tell you what it needs, what it wants, who it is. It’s like a character in a story; you’re the author but the character is somehow alive. It’s pretty mysterious.” – Megan Rooney
Rooney often speaks in aggressive terms about her works, of wounding, tearing down, or excavating, and then mending, repairing, and rebuilding. She describes the members of her painting “families” developing character from the trials they undergo, just as human beings learn and grow from their life experiences. As Rooney worked on the paintings for her 2024 exhibition “Echoes & Hours,” held at Kettle’s Yard, one of the University of Cambridge’s (UK) museums, she found that Up Comes Yesterday, included in this slide show, took longer to complete than any other in the family. She describes this work as “the matriarch,” and attributes its powerful status in the group to its longer creation process, just a family’s elders may gain strength through their experiences.
As a student, the artist was originally drawn to intaglio printing processes, especially etching. In etching, the printmaker can return to the same plate again and again, making new marks and using a new acid bath to cut them into the metal plate, before transferring them to paper with ink. Rooney recounted that some of her printing plates would disintegrate because she would rework them so frequently. She relates the etching method to her current process of grinding away and rebuilding her surfaces to find the strongest composition. Once a family of works is completed, the artist chooses the strongest for exhibition but she always leaves a few in the studio. This ensures that she won’t feel abandoned or at a loss when she returns to work. The older paintings are a beginning point for the new family, so that connections exist between all of her bodies of work.
“Painting is monastic for me; it requires a life of total devotion. I more or less don’t do anything else.” – Megan Rooney
Rooney doesn’t consider her works to be purely abstract, though there are few concrete objects represented. Her earlier paintings often contained bits of bodies or other recognizable objects but those have disappeared in her more recent works. Still, the artist incorporates fragments of images and impressions experienced outside the studio and builds those into the works. Though the finished work may contain only hints of those originals details, the results are suggestive of landscapes, such as the summery backyard of Sunday Laundry (2023) or urban sidewalks of The Insomnia of the Rider (2025), both included in this slide show. In addition to Rooney’s similarities to Mitchell, the artist has been compared to J.A.M. Whistler (American, 1834-1903), Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) and Frank Auerbach (German-British, 1931-2024). In Rooney’s You came down (earth) I (2025), included in the slide show, I see connections to Monet’s Water Lilies series (LINK), in both the large horizontal format and the varied blues and greens that seem to support the patches of yellow.
“Some aspects of life are fleeting and ephemeral, they pass through you, never to return. No one can own or possess them.” – Megan Rooney
In addition to painting, Rooney has worked in sculpture, poetry, performance, and installation. Her solo exhibitions are organized to create a unified environment in which the works converse among themselves and with the viewer. The painter has also created dance performances in collaboration with dancers and musicians, which use the large paintings, especially murals created on site, as a setting. Videos of two of these dance performances can be see here (LINK) and here (LINK. Rooney’s on-site murals are painted using her usual technique, but in a much shorter time period. She is often painting right up until the last minute because she wants the painting to be a response to its immediate context, physically and emotionally. Though she mourns these works when they are painted over at the end of the exhibition, she values the experience of making and losing them as an inherent aspect of human life.
Megan Rooney’s paintings have many links to art of the past while demonstrating innovative, highly personal qualities. Her commitment to her process and philosophy have produced some fascinating and moving works. The artist's colors produce shimmering, shifting environments in which shape and color hint at a heightened world luring the viewer to engage.
“To be a painter is to be in a constant position of being lost, and trying to find a way forward, a way out, trying to find something to latch onto.” – Megan Rooney
Exhibitions:
“Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue” through August 2, 2025, at Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, London, UK. ropac.net/exhibitions/748-megan-rooney-yellow-yellow-blue
“Joan Mitchell and Megan Rooney: “Painting from nature”” through October 19, 2025, at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, China World Mall South Zone W.Bldg., 1 Jian‘guomenwai Ave., Beijing, China. us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/magazine/articles/espace-louis-vuitton-beijing
Please share your comments and questions on Substack. LINK: irequireart.substack.com/p/viewing-room-40/comments
Longer captions may not be fully visible on smaller screens. We apologize for the inconvenience.
When the caption obscures part of the artwork, click on the image to turn off the caption.
