‘Painting's dangerous work!' The artist whose tools are brushes and power sanders

The Guardian

09-06-2025

'I'm just trying to get one step ahead of my paintings,' says Megan Rooney, who is surrounded by the vibrant, gestural abstract works in her studio. She moves through the space restlessly as we chat, rocking on to her tiptoes and arching her arms through the air in an echo of the curving strokes in the paintings. She calls it 'dangerous work', her slow, fraught process of creation. 'After a decade of serious painting,' she says, 'I still feel bewildered and beguiled.'
Rooney, 40, grew up in Canada and now lives in London, where she is preparing for her forthcoming show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. She has a unique approach of adding and subtracting. She begins by adding paint to a blank canvas, then removes it with power sanders, then adds more on top, then removes it again, in a painstaking, almost bloody battle to find her way to the finished work. Each painting ends up with 10 or 15 other works beneath it.
'In the beginning of a painting's life,' she says, 'it's like meeting new people – superficial. Eventually they have something to tell me. In knowing and searching, the work finds its legs.' She seems both tortured and enraptured by the process. Its slowness sets her apart from many abstract painters, who tend to work in a rapid expressionist way. Rooney pushes back at being compared to them. Her paintings are defined by the prolonged accumulation of both paint, she says, and lived experiences, until they become strong enough to stand alone. 'I think that if you threw them out of the car on the highway, they'd just sprout legs and walk.'
Most of the works are the same size, matching the wingspan of the average woman, although Rooney does make huge ones too, as well as murals. She refers to the works as 'people', telling me about their personalities and lineages. Heavily influenced by the seasons and the weather, they reflect the colour palette of their surroundings. 'The city is my main collaborator,' she says, although her works have a lot in common with much less urban paintings, too. There is a lot of late Monet here, and some of Joan Mitchell's verdant gestural brushstrokes. (An exhibition bringing Rooney and Mitchell together is open until October at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing.)
The magnetic, bright and varied colours pull you in. Each shade is so exact, so bright and flat: the warm, clay reds in Old Rome, painted this year, are set against the perfect cerulean and purple of an early evening Italian sky; the oddly matte lavenders that dot many of Rooney's new works are an icily satisfying periwinkle; the pale pinks make me think of French rococo painting and Gainsborough's aristocratic skirts. The canvases seem to glow. They are already old souls when they are first exhibited, after so many iterations on the way to the finish line.
As we pace around the studio, pausing in front of works to survey them, Rooney tells me about the importance of movement in her practice. She has a background in dance, which is immediately apparent in the poised way she seems to move through the studio beside me, and she often commissions dance performances to accompany her exhibitions. A new one will take place at the opening of her new show, building on the ongoing story she has constructed of a doomed love between a moth and a spider.
Rooney seems an unflinchingly serious artist. She is uninterested in self-promotion, although her work is critically acclaimed and has found both commercial and institutional support. 'The pursuit of art is a serious calling,' she says. 'If you don't care about it really fucking intensely, why should anybody else?' As she tells me about the relentlessness of her practice, it's clear that this isn't just something she says. 'You just have to sacrifice all the other things you wanted to do with your life,' she says. 'Painting is too demanding.'
Rooney's attitude is refreshing amid an overly online culture that seems obsessed with easily digestible content and a quick laugh. Her paintings are beautiful (a word she doesn't shy away from) but also substantive. 'Beautiful is intellectual,' she tells me, recognising the complexity of humanity's capacity to create and seek it. 'The fight of producing culture isn't something to be taken lightly.' Surveying one of her paintings carefully, she nods and says quietly, almost to herself: 'I think that's a good painting.'
Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue is at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, from 12 June to 2 August