Hollie O’Neill
Visual Artist
Waikato
Hollie O’Neill is a contemporary New Zealand artist based in Waikato, creating artworks that explore the interplay of light, colour, materiality, and perception. A full-time artist since 2002, her practice spans painting, sculpture, and light-based mixed media.
Inspired by the landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand, O’Neill is drawn to the subtle visual experiences found in nature—shifting colour, reflections, changing light, and atmosphere. These encounters become points of departure, brought into the studio and intuitively translated through colour, material, and reflection.
Working with mirrored glass, aluminium, epoxy, pigment, and canvas, she creates artworks that respond to their surroundings and change with light, movement, and viewpoint. Her reflective works offer a dynamic visual experience, while her paintings on cotton canvas explore softer, more atmospheric expressions of light and colour.
O’Neill has received national recognition as a finalist in the NZ Painting & Printmaking Award, the Parkin Drawing Prize, and the Academy Prize for Visual Art. In 2024, she received the Eden Park Best in Colour Award. Her work is held in public and private collections in New Zealand and internationally, including The Arts House Trust collection.
Hollie O’Neill
Original Painting
Pigment soaked cotton canvas
Framed in black float frame
Dimensions: 800×1200mm
Veil-Fields continues Hollie O’Neill’s exploration of colour and light, shifting her focus to the absorbent intimacy of cotton canvases. Through a soak-stain approach, she applies delicate veils of diluted pigment, using her brush to guide the paint as it merges and flows across the surface, creating luminous effects that respond to both material and movement. The process balances intention and intuition, producing surfaces where colour appears to breathe and shimmer within the fabric itself.
These paintings evoke atmospheric depth and shifting light, capturing the ephemeral interplay of colour and illumination. Inspired by the skies at sunrise and sunset, each composition radiates the subtle glow of sunlight glare or the fleeting hues of twilight afterglow. The works are gently layered, luminous expanses of colour that float across the canvas like veils of light, encouraging the viewer to linger and experience shifting atmospheric effects, inviting repeated, slow looking to discover new subtleties with each moment of observation.