Elaine Hamilton

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Elaine Hamilton-O'Neal (born October 13, 1920 in Paradise, Maryland; died March 15, 2010 in Woodstock, Maryland) was a notable abstract artist and mountain climber. She was the wife of Hayes Aircraft Corporation engineer and executive Bill O'Neal.

Elaine was the daughter of Robert Bruce and Lee (née Wood) Hamilton and was raised at "Emerald Hill", a family estate in Daniels, along the Patapsco River, just north of Ellicott City. During the summers, the family decamped to the nearby Patapsco Valley State Park, sleeping on straw beds under canvas shelters and hiking to Orange Grove for weekly supplies.

Hamilton met Bill O'Neal, an engineer for the Glenn L. Martin Company, at a dinner at the Baltimore Country Club in 1942. They undertook to marry with the expectation that they would not produce children and would each pursue their individual lives and careers to the fullest, even spending most of their time apart. She graduated from the Maryland Institute in 1945 and then spent two years studying at the Art Students League in New York City with portraitist Robert Brackman. In 1949 she enrolled at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, where she was mentored by Diego Rivera and briefly trained as a matador. She was commissioned to paint a large-scale mural at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende. She was honored with a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951.

In 1952, after O'Neal took a job at Hayes in Birmingham, the couple purchased the "Old Mill" on Shades Creek in the Mountain Brook Estates section of Mountain Brook. That same year, Hamilton attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship.

She extended her stay to an 8-year residency, with exhibitions of her increasingly abstract paintings in Rome and Milan, and at the Venice Biennale. In the early 1960s, Hamilton moved to Paris, and also began making annual visits to the Himalayan mountains, "to see where the earth and the sky touched." She was hosted by the ruling Namgyal family in Sikkim and began to practice Buddhist meditation. She was also a frequent visitor in Pakistan where she was given a solo exhibition at the Pakistan Arts Council in Karachi and inspired a new interest in abstract art as a means of "universal expression" in that country.

Back in France, Hamilton translated her experiences in the Himalayas, and her meditations, into large-scale "action paintings". She was championed by influential critic Michel Tapié, a co-founder of the International Center of Aesthetic Research in Turin, Italy, who showed her work in exhibitions around the world. She purchased a 42-room chateau outside Paris in 1971 and filled it with art and antiques.

Throughout her career, Hamilton hosted dinners and parties at the mill when she was in Birmingham, and threw elaborate gatherings for her husband when he and his friends visited her. In 2002, occasioned by their 60th anniversary, she and O'Neal made plans to retire together to Maryland. He sold the Old Mill to appreciative neighbors, but collapsed during a medical check-up and died soon before making the move. She settled in a French-styled country house in Granite, Maryland, which she furnished with her European antiques, animal hides, Himalayan textiles, and a full-scale gilded Buddhist altar.

Hamilton died in 2010.

Solo exhibitions

  • Baltimore Museum of Art, 1951
  • Instituto Allende, Mexico, 1952
  • Galleria De Arte Moderno, Mexico City, 1952
  • Galleria San Marco, Rome, Italy, 1954
  • Marticks Gallery, Baltimore, 1955
  • Galleria "l'Il Milione", Milan, 1958
  • Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan, 1960 (Invited Artist)
  • Fujikawa Gallery, Osaka, Japan, 1961
  • Minami Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 1961
  • Center of Aesthetic Research, Turin, Italy, 1967
  • Gallery 31, Birmingham, Alabama, 1968
  • Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia, 1968

Awards

  • Portrait Prize, Maryland Institute, 1945
  • Post-Graduate Fellowship Scholarship Award from the Maryland Institute, 1946
  • First Prize, Peale Museum, 1951
  • Popular Prize Award from The Baltimore Museum of Art Exhibition, 1952
  • Mural Commission for the Instituto Allende, Mexico, 1952
  • Fulbright Award in Painting to Italy, 1951
  • Popular Prize, Maryland Artists Exhibition, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1959
  • First Prize, Biennale de Menton, France, 1968

References

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