Skip to main content
These final hours embrace at last; this is our ending, this is our past.
Artist
Robyn O'Neil
(American, born 1977)
Date2007
MediumGraphite on paper
DimensionsSheet: 77 1/2 × 161 1/4 in. (196.85 × 409.58 cm)
Framed: 83 × 166 3/4 in. (210.82 × 423.55 cm)
Framed: 83 × 166 3/4 in. (210.82 × 423.55 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Marshall R. Young Oil Co. in Honor of George Marshall Young, Sr., Chairman
Object number2012.2
Status
On viewCopyright© Robyn O'Neil
Category
Label TextWith an unassuming 0.5 mm mechanical graphite pencil and a shading stump, Robyn O’Neil produces large-scale drawings that explore equally large-scale themes of evolution, catastrophe, and apocalypse. These final hours embrace at last; this is our ending, this is our past., 2007, is the final image in a multidrawing suite that narrates the end of the world. The series begins rather innocuously with crowds of identical everymen engaged in leisure activities. In successive drawings, the weather grows darker and the figures grow fewer, doomed to extinction by the follies of mankind and the uncontrollable powers of nature.
A fourteen-foot-long seascape, These final hours embrace at last depicts a single figure hanging by a fraying thread suspended inexplicably over a vast ocean. He dangles, tiny and powerless, between ominous clouds and a sea of churning waves built up of countless lines and smudged layers of graphite. The figure is the lone survivor of the artist’s invented population, and his fate appears to be sealed. The drawing was inspired by The Life Line, 1884 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), the American artist Winslow Homer’s (1836–1910) iconic painting of a dramatic marine rescue. In O’Neil’s drawing, however, there is no rescuer in sight. Her figure is alone, unable to move forward or back, stuck in the anxious, existential realm of the unknown.
A fourteen-foot-long seascape, These final hours embrace at last depicts a single figure hanging by a fraying thread suspended inexplicably over a vast ocean. He dangles, tiny and powerless, between ominous clouds and a sea of churning waves built up of countless lines and smudged layers of graphite. The figure is the lone survivor of the artist’s invented population, and his fate appears to be sealed. The drawing was inspired by The Life Line, 1884 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), the American artist Winslow Homer’s (1836–1910) iconic painting of a dramatic marine rescue. In O’Neil’s drawing, however, there is no rescuer in sight. Her figure is alone, unable to move forward or back, stuck in the anxious, existential realm of the unknown.