Check out Joe O’Connell’s Artwork

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe O’Connell.

Joe, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I grew up near Thomas Edison’s West Caldwell laboratory and my grandfather had been friends with one of Edison’s sons. Our house was filled with motors, gadgets and even some lab notebooks from the Edison factory. From an early age I was a maker; I made light sculptures, a gas-powered skateboard, a hovercraft, catapults, creative folding weapons – everything a boy could think of. My mother was an artist and taught my sisters and I to use clay and draw at an early age. At that age, and even until my 30’s I didn’t call what I did ‘art’ – it was just making stuff to fulfill particular ideas that would grab hold of me and not let go.

I started my company Creative Machines in 1995 to make cool things in social spaces. That mission is pretty much the same 23 years later. Purely by coincidence I rented my first space from Thomas Edison’s former shop foreman. He was in his 90’s at the time and I was in my 20’s. In an unforgettable year or two he would lie down in a hammock as I worked and tell me about how Edison managed a creative workforce. Those lessons inform how I run Creative Machines to this day.

We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
My art spans a wide range of materials – stainless steel, LED light, acrylic – and we are branching out in some exciting new directions. But the common thread is interactivity and the need to remind people that they still have bodies. In this age of screens. I want my art to wake up everyone’s cerebellum. The cerebellum is 10 percent of the brain’s mass but over 50 percent of its neurons. The cerebellum is responsible for motor control, coordination, language, pain, reward and the integration of all these. Many of humankind’s most distinct behaviors like playing music, team sports, fine tool use, hunting in a group, and complex pattern recognition occur in the cerebellum. As the internet grabs more and more of people’s cerebral space, I go for the portion of the iceberg under the surface – the tactile, embodied, spatial, muscular skills that make us human. That’s why my art is increasingly kinetic and responsive to motion.

What do you think it takes to be successful as an artist?
Since I work in the public realm, I define success as popularity over time. There is really no other measure. I am usually working with other people’s money, and I keep that in mind. What I make has to be popular with a wide range of people and it has to hold that popularity over time, or I consider it a failure. I usually give a speech at the opening of each art piece that I do, and sometimes year’s later kids will come up to me and tell me how they love my sculpture and remember the talk I gave. That is very gratifying.

I also need to make enough money to support my company and that has been difficult. The field of public art is extremely competitive and that drives prices down to the point where profit margins are too thin to support the risky business that large scale art really is. I like to say that I’m an artist while I’m coming up with the concept and pitching it, but once the contract is signed I take off the beret and put down the glass of single malt Scotch because I’m a fixed-price high-risk design-build contractor. The sad truth is that most artists don’t last long in the field of public art because they are driven to take risks in order to win fixed-price commissions and then are just one mistake away from losing their shirts. I wish it wasn’t this way.

Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I’ve been doing this for about 25 years and have sculptures all over the US and many foreign countries. Closer to home I have a few pieces in the Phoenix metro area. In Scottsdale I have “Lenses” on the SE corner of Scottsdale Quarter. Something most people don’t know is that at night the images it displays are what you’d see if you moved a rectangle over several of my favorite paintings including ones by Van Gogh and Miro. In Mesa you can see Twilight Garden along the light rail line. In Phoenix, I have two pieces at the Children’s Hospital – Sprouts, which is located at the front entrance and the flowers that cover the ceiling in certain places inside. Finally, I’ll be doing a large piece for the new Goodyear Recreation Center.

Contact Info:

• Address: Creative Machines Inc.
  4141 East Irvington Road
  Tucson, AZ 85714
• Website: www.creativemachines.com
• Phone: 520.294.0939 extention 100
• Email: joconnell@creativemachines.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creativemachines/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/creativemachinesinc/

Image Credit:
Creative Machines

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