Education
Connell attended Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island (1958–1960), the Art Students League, New York (1960–1961) and New York University (1962) where he studied Chinese print making.
Connell attended Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island (1958–1960), the Art Students League, New York (1960–1961) and New York University (1962) where he studied Chinese print making.
His first show was in New York in 1962. I painted these rooms that were like drooling little flashes of leaves---a quick stroke. I made paper rooms that you would walk into and they would kind of rustle.
That was an attempt at an environment.
lieutenant wasn"t terribly complete.. kind of like the shell.
Actually, I didn"t think of those as "environments". I didn"t have that word then
In the mid-1960s, he moved to California, where he worked as the set designer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
In the 70s, 80s and 90s, he worked primarily in the Southwestern United States, where he painted large murals and was visible in New Mexico"s most respected art galleries, being part of the Santa Fe artist group Nerve and gaining a reputation for his large installations. He is particularly well known for his drawings, some of which are done in charcoal and spray paint and can be as large as twenty feet high and thirty feet wide. Connell used plaster-of-Paris in the 1980s, and later turned to tar, paper and wax, in large figurative sculptures.
He also used bronze, cement, wood, and chicken wire.
In the early 80s, he mostly gave up using commercial paints and began making his own out of iron oxide and pigments. In later paintings, he used ashes, mud and earth.
His work has also included elements of writing and occasionally audio tape. Connell"s influences included Hokusai, Rembrandt, Balzac, Dante, Giacometti and De Kooning.
Some of his better-known projects include:
The Construction of Kuan-Yin Lake (1982–1989): A multimedia project that included sculpture, painting, writing and audio and was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Raft Project (1989–1994): A giant sculpture/painting project with painter Eugene Newmann. lieutenant was commonly perceived as being a takeoff on Géricault"s The Raft of the Medusa. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas
Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas
The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico
The Hess Collection, Napa Valley, California
Jeff Wiesner, Otis, Maine
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Scottsdale, Arizona
University of Arizona Art Museum, Tucson, Arizona
University Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico.