Current Exhibition

Recent Work

Eileen Mooney ’96

April 6—May 10, 2025

Opening reception: Friday, April 18, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m

The Mark W. Potter Gallery at Taft School is pleased to announce the opening of its exhibition season with Recent Work, a solo show by artist Eileen Mooney ’96. The show opens on April 6 and runs through May 10. An opening reception will be held on Friday, April 18, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m., when guests will have the opportunity to meet the artist.

Eileen’s work encourages contemplation and connection, bridging perception, existence, and artistic expression. “I paint mostly from perception but also experiment with abstraction,” says Eileen. “Across my work, I aim to express being—being with objects, landscapes, and light. The objects exist whether I am there or not; my paintings capture the moment of witnessing—of being—on canvas.” Eileen holds degrees from Boston University, Western Connecticut State University, and Harvard University. She is currently completing a doctorate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University, an interdisciplinary background that informs her artistic approach.

The Mark W. Potter Gallery is located on the Taft School campus, 110 Woodbury Road, Watertown, CT. Visitors are encouraged to park in the lot located across the street from campus in the lot at the corner of Middlebury Road and Woodbury Road. The gallery is open Monday through Friday, 8am till 5pm when school is in session. The gallery honors the legacy of Mark Winslow Potter, member of the class of 1948, teacher, painter, and mentor. Like Potter, himself, the gallery cultivates artistic and intellectual growth in the Taft community; in our students, faculty, alumni, families, and friends.

Artist Statement

For me, painting is an inevitable act, and it is fueled by the tensions of life. Even in my long drought of not-painting, I was still thinking about painting. My perceptual work, which is on the left and right-hand walls, is more phenomenological: it is about the immediacy of presence, space, and capturing the sensory input of a moment. Tension in my perceptual work can be characterized by that feeling of working against a clock–as light changes over time, it is always a rush to figure out how to respond to the light, the weather, and the mood of the moment. Across all of these works, the subject is atmosphere–particularly in my still life work. I look at Morandi, Ruth Miller, Lennart Anderson, and Susan Jane Walp.

The front and back walls of the show are my more abstract work. While the work on the back wall consists of landscapes, they are more abstract in nature. Each piece is the same view out my kitchen sink window, looking through the bare branches and vines of the trees and shrubs that separate my home from the rest of the neighborhood. Though this work could be done from observation, standing in my kitchen looking out the window, I intentionally use photographic reference and my memory to construct these compositions so I can explore more freely the graphic elements of the branches and to push and pull the color. The view that they capture is part of my daily life–whenever I clean up after a meal, when I wash my hands, when I get a glass of water, etc., there is that “through” view–what is seen through the complexity and entanglements of what is there. Contemporary artists such as Pam Evelyn, Christina Kimeze, and Maja Ruznic inform this work, along with Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse.

My abstract work on the front wall represents the reciprocal relationship between two seemingly disparate aspects of my identity: my artist self and my math teacher self. From the time when I became a mother and started my job teaching at Miss Porter’s, I started to lose my connection to my own artistic practice. Over time, I somehow reconciled with it by involving myself much more with the psychological and philosophical aspects of teaching math. But when the pandemic hit, things changed for me. I lost many things from my in-person classroom, but among them were my white board and Expo markers. Even though I knew that I relied on my artistic skillset to draw diagrams and write clearly on the board, I didn’t quite realize until then how much my boardwork had been my lifeline into accessing this other dimension of myself that was otherwise dormant, due to the constraints of my life. The actual mark making that I engaged in on a daily basis was charged with my personal history as an artist–from the calligraphy I did as a kid to my serious artistic practice that began in my MFA program at Westconn–and this daily activity was crucial for me. While an iPad and Apple pencil were a decent substitute for the purpose of teaching during Covid, they just did not serve the other identities that I carried into my teaching practice. All of that is to say that this body of work is the result of that realization. I put the numbers and letters in sort of a still life space and try to create a tensional atmosphere that is informed by my observational work. Morandi continues to inform this work, along with Philip Guston.

It is not lost on me that this show, in this gallery, is between two spaces that I spent hours and hours in as a student at Taft. This gallery is sandwiched between the Black Box Theater and right down the hall from Bingham Auditorium, where I first found my artistic self, albeit in acting. So in a very tangible way, I am very grateful to be able to show my work in the space where I took those first risks in this long adventure of creative making.

Artist Bio

Eileen Mooney grew up at and attended The Taft School. She was a faculty kid to Jim Mooney, who taught physics at Taft from 1985 until 2021. She graduated from Taft in 1996, and then went on to study philosophy at Boston University. Throughout that time, she made art on and off as a hobby. After graduating from there in 2000, she taught math for two years before she decided to study painting seriously. She attended Western Connecticut State University, where she studied with Marjorie Portnow and Margaret Grimes, and earned her MFA in painting in 2006. At WCSU, she explored observational painting through self portraiture and still life. She also was a graduate assistant in Drawing I and Painting I. Upon completion, she taught studio art at South Kent School. After two years, she relocated to Farmington to teach math and art at Miss Porter’s School. She has been there since 2008, and while her primary role has been teaching math, she has engaged artistically through doing set design, designing STEAM curriculum for their InterMission and summer camp programs, and with teaching Studio Art. She recently taught Painting at Taft Summer School and Drawing from Observation at Hotchkiss Summer Portals. During her time at Porter’s, she completed more graduate work. In 2015, she earned her ALM in Mathematics for Teaching from Harvard University and in 2024 she earned her PhD in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology. Her dissertation was an autoethnographic study on the working conditions of teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. She has two wonderful kids–a 16 year old daughter and a 13 year old son, a loving husband who is also an educator and a mental health counselor, and her two infinitely loving pets, Stewie the Dog and Lucy the Cat.

Eileen has shown her work in several galleries in NYC and CT. She is represented by Bowery Gallery in Chelsea, New York, NY. She currently writes the blog for the gallery, which provides her with lots of opportunity to think and talk about art.