Aftermath

About:

Every crash has two parts: the impact and the image that comes after. In Aftermath, Vernon O'Meally paints both. Each diptych puts a free-form abstract panel, worked like jazz from rhythm and impulse, next to a hyper-rendered wreck of an American or European icon: a Chevelle SS, a Countach, the General Lee, an E30. The abstract half is the collision itself, pure energy, no regard. The rendered half is what's left once the noise stops, and it's the part we photograph and share.

The series is built around the X of the Confederate battle flag, the saltire, and moves through three stages: spectacle, reckoning, and liberation. The General Lee, one of the most famous cars on television and a vehicle for that flag, sits empty mid-collision while a small crowd on the horizon holds up phones to record its fall. It isn't a celebration or a mourning. It's a witness.

O'Meally's linescape mark-making, which he has developed since 2011, runs through the abstract panels. The work comes out of a practice where music has always been the source and the painted line acts like a beat.

Vernon O’Meally (b. 1989, Atlanta, GA) lives and works in Maspeth, New York. O’Meally is best known for his large-scale paintings that move fluidly between figuration and abstraction, painting and drawing. His works foreground his signature linescape charcoal mark-making and expressive brushwork, often incorporating oil sticks, spray paint, and collaged cut-outs from other paintings. Rooted in abstract expressionism, O’Meally’s paintings are visual representations of what it feels like to be alive today—simultaneously an escape from reality and a reflection of it. Shaped by the spirit of jazz, hip-hop, punk, and funk, his works operate like great songs: some are anthems, others ballads; some pulse with improvisation while others carry tension and disruption. Music serves not as a direct subject but as an analogy for emotion, rhythm, and atmosphere. His canvases become fields where marks layer, rhythms compete, and forms collide, creating richly textured compositions that privilege feeling over fixed narrative.

O’Meally’s approach to painting is deeply intuitive. He surrenders to impulse and allows instinct to guide his hand, producing works that are at once deeply personal and universally resonant. His paintings become physical manifestations of emotional and psychological states, sometimes incorporating fragments of memory and popular culture, with each gesture embodying movement, sensation, and experience. Informed by a somatic understanding of painting, these works continually push against the boundaries of traditional abstraction.

That same energetic language extends into his collaged still lifes and detailed paintings of sports and muscle cars in the aftermath of collisions, where emotional and psychological tensions take physical form. The crash becomes both a literal event and a metaphor for contemporary life—a culture moving at full speed toward uncertain outcomes.

Drawing from art history, music, film, and popular culture, O’Meally assembles fragments of visual experience into paintings that are rhythmic, immersive, and emotionally charged. Through a process of appropriation, layering, and transformation, disparate influences converge into a visual language that is uniquely his own.

The subject changes. The energy doesn't.