Billyo O’Donnell is a Missouri painter whose recent work, in addition to being painterly and color rich, is often highly textural.

I’ve had O’Donnell on my list of artists to cover on Lines and Colors for some time (it’s a long list), and his style has evolved since I first encountered his work. His newer work is thick with textural paint application.

At times it seems more prevalent than others, but it’s always difficult to get an accurate feeling of textural surfaces from photographs. There’s also the element of scale; small paintings presented in the same size photograph as large ones without reference for scale will appear quite different in surface characteristics.

O’Donnell frequently explores the effects of shadows in bright sunlight, with dappled patterns falling over houses, fields and objects. He makes use of bold value statements and high chroma passages of color as a counterpoint to the character of the paint application.

In 2001, O’Donnell took on a project to paint a plein air painting in each of the 114 counties in the state of Missouri. In collaboration with writer Karen Glines, the result was a book called Painting Missouri, that appears to be currently out of print after its third printing. I picked up a copy when O’Donnel was here in the Philadelphia area some years ago acting as a juror for a plein air event.

There is a dedicated website for the book, on which prints of individual paintings appear to be still available. The paintings in the book, which you can see in small previews on the Prints page, are in his older, still painterly but less physically dimensional style.

The images on his website are also somewhat small; you can see larger ones on the sites of galleries in which he is represented (linked below).

“World War I and American Art” is an exhibition currently at the Museum of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts here in Philadelphia.

Drawing partly from their own collection and partly from loans, the Academy’s Museum of has mounted an exhibition that delves into the response of American artists to the First World War in Europe. Next year marks the centenary of the official U.S. involvement in that war; the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.

The exhibition tries to give a broad view of the events leading up to and during the war, both here and in Europe, from the horrors and insanity of combat, to the desperate hope of those who waited for their loved ones to return, to the end of the conflict.

The highlight of the show is John Singer Sargent’s monumental and striking work, Gassed (Wikipedia link) — on loan from the Imperial War Museum in London (image above, top, with detail). It depicts a group of British soldiers, their eyes bandaged from the corrosive effects of the poison gas, hands on one another’s shoulders, following in line to a dressing station where their wounds could be better tended.

I saw this painting when it was in New York in 1999, and it’s stunning, both visually and emotionally. On Sunday, I will be taking my mother-in-law to the museum to see the painting. Her father was gassed in WWI. Though he survived, he was without hair on his body, his lungs never quite recovered and he died young.

The other works in he show are both from combat artists like Kerr Ebby, and some of the finest American painters of the time.

In honor of Veterans Day, museum admission is free for military veterans and active service members from November 11 to the 13th. By virtue of sponsorship, the museum is also open free to the general public on Sundays through the duration of the exhibition.

“World War I and American Art” will be on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through April 9, 2017.

(Images above: John Singer Sargent, Claggett Wilson, Kerr Eby, Violet Oakley, George Luks, Gifford Beal, Childe Hassam)