Megan Rooney: The Living Surface of Painting

Megan Rooney’s paintings exist in a state of flux—at once tactile and atmospheric, intuitive and exacting. Her process unfolds through cycles of layering, abrasion, and renewal, transforming the canvas into a living surface that holds memory, gesture, and time. Each work bears the physical rhythm of its making, its sedimented color fields absorbing traces of weather, emotion, and thought.

Born in South Africa and raised between Brazil and Canada, the London-based artist has cultivated a painterly language that moves fluidly between abstraction and storytelling. Across painting, performance, and installation, Rooney explores how colour operates as both structure and narrative, how gesture translates the body’s intelligence, and how painting can still convey the emotional density of lived experience. Her signature “wingspan” format—scaled to the reach of her outstretched arms—anchors this physicality, aligning the act of painting with the dimensions of breath, movement, and human proportion.

In “Yellow Yellow Blue”, her summer exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac London, Rooney immersed viewers in a chromatic terrain between yellow and blue—a fertile spectrum of greens that embodied renewal, transition, and the cyclical nature of making. Also shown this year, in “Painting from Nature” at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, her canvases entered into dialogue with Joan Mitchell’s gestural landscapes, reaffirming painting as a vital, embodied language shared across generations.

Rooted in an understanding of painting as both material and temporal, Rooney’s practice continues to expand the possibilities of abstraction. Her surfaces seem to breathe with duration: they record not only what is seen but what is felt. In the following conversation for Whitewall, she reflects on gesture, color, and the necessity of slowness—on why painting, for her, remains an act of devotion to perception, memory, and the human experience of being alive.

WHITEWALL: Your paintings are often described as immersive, almost like environments the viewer can walk into. What do you hope people physically and emotionally experience when standing in front of your canvases?

MEGAN ROONEY: The paintings reveal themselves very slowly to me, during the weeks and months of their making. I think this is similar for the viewer—it requires some work to decipher them. In this process of active looking, the paintings become like portals, transporting the viewer back into the earlier iterations of the painting’s life.

I get the feeling this is where the emotional aspect of the work comes in, because as time pushes forward, the paintings develop radically different personalities and bear witness to it—a process that can be quite brutal as I sand back and back through layers of conversations I have with the canvas, stripping it back and rebuilding it day after day.

My “wingspan” paintings, which refer to the width of my outstretched arms, have a curious approximation to the human body—they feel familiar, almost like people, but slightly enlarged or swollen. In that sense, they invite you to enter them, and if the painting is successful, the viewer will inhabit the painting like a climate.

The Artist’s Process and Experience

WW: Gesture is clearly central to your process—the body seems to leave traces in the work. How conscious are you of performance when you paint, and how does movement guide the composition?

MR: There’s a kind of imaginary umbilical cord connecting my body and the paintings, because everything transfers from me onto the surface. So I guess I am hyper-aware of how my body interacts with the surface, but in a somewhat semiconscious sort of way, because over many years of working like this some things have become instinctual.Although I would say that I am always trying to find a balance between letting the colour live freely on the surface while bending it to my own desires. My sensitivity toward colour is also closely related to my physical body, and by this I mean different colours trigger wildly different responses when I paint. I recently started working with cadmium red, and this was a departure for me. I find I feel quite claustrophobic working with it, and as such the paintings have taken on a rather antagonistic, almost confrontational feeling. The forms that have emerged are more muscular and somewhat abrasive.

“There’s a kind of imaginary umbilical cord connecting my body and the paintings,”

Megan Rooney

WW: You’ve described your paintings as “capsules of time and space.” What kinds of external conditions—whether environmental, political, or biographical—do you feel register most strongly in this cycle?

MR: The paintings soak up everything I experience, read, and am exposed to. How these things manifest in the work is not something I can pinpoint directly. I use paint as a way to whittle the world down in an attempt to make sense of it, I guess. The world confounds me—its brutal violence and tender love side by side in a never-ending chain of unimaginable suffering for some, and peace and beauty for others.

Attempting to describe this complexity in language or painting feels like a huge mistake. I don’t think that’s my job, but I can say that the things I feel and acutely observe I transmit into the works—but I do not attempt to tell you what you see when you look at them.

“Painting from Nature”

WW: “Painting from Nature” places your work in dialogue with Joan Mitchell, whose practice shows how abstraction can hold both memory and landscape at once. How do you see your own relationship to landscape and place—are you also painting from memory, or is it more about the present moment in the studio?

MR: I don’t start out with an end image in mind, and there’s no repeated formula to how I work. So every painting feels like starting at the beginning. This can be somewhat daunting, as I never know exactly how long it will take to complete. I spend a lot of time roaming the streets and parks in the various cities I find myself in, and I commit what I see to memory and try to summon it when I’m back in the studio. I don’t want the painting to feel like a painting—I’m not really interested in “paintings.” I want them to feel like the world.

WW: Your titles—“Eyes on Arcadia,” “Flyer and the Seed,” “Wild Wind Roaming (Night)”—have a poetic quality that suggests fragments of narrative. How do you arrive at these titles?

MR: I always title my paintings at the very end of the process. This is my way of saying goodbye to them.

WW: Painting has been declared “dead” many times, yet your practice insists on its urgency. What possibilities do you feel painting still holds today, and why is it the medium that continues to matter most to you?

MR: Goodness! I was recently in a cathedral in Malta having a look at a couple of incredible Caravaggios from 1607–1608, and you could’ve heard a pin drop in that room—everyone was completely transfixed. Outside, a number of paintings were under painstaking restoration, observed by groups of people gathered around, witnessing this important work. Humans have always been invested in storytelling, and painting is one way to do that.

An Ever-Evolving Practice

WW: Looking across your recent exhibitions—from immersive wall works to monumental canvases—how do you see your practice evolving? What questions are you asking yourself in the studio now that feel most urgent?

MR: I believe in doing things by hand, slowly. Every day in the studio is sacred. I ride the color rebellion of my paintings, and I don’t hope for anything more.

“I ride the color rebellion of my paintings,”

Megan Rooney