Rhythmic Patterns by Jeanne M. Connolly explores repetition, movement, and visual cadence through the artist’s Couching Overlay Technique, merging painting, textile, and sculptural form.

The work began as an expressive abstract painting created with acrylic, gouache, ink, watercolor, oil pastels, crayons, ink sticks, graphite, and pencil on paper, later heat-pressed to a wooden support. Beneath the textile surface, vibrant passages of crimson, violet, and green interact with dotted markings and crosshatched lines. These gestures move across the composition like beats within a musical score, creating a sense of rhythm and syncopation.

Connolly then overlays the painting with a layer of recycled lace, replacing the burlap used in related works. The open lace pattern acts as a delicate filtering surface, allowing glimpses of the energetic underpainting to emerge through its intricate structure. The textile veil softens the bold gestures beneath while simultaneously revealing fragments of color and movement.

Using her Couching Overlay Technique, Connolly hand-couches looping circular forms made from natural and acrylic fibers onto the lace surface. These sculptural rings create a dynamic interplay of repetition and variation, echoing the rhythmic language suggested by the title. The layered circles move across the composition like visual pulses, balancing spontaneity with structural harmony.

Mounted on a solid wooden support frame, Rhythmic Patterns transforms an expressive abstract painting into a tactile composition where painting, textile, and relief converge. The result is a work that reads like music translated into form—an abstract rhythm built from color, repetition, and movement.

Connolly’s Couching Overlay Technique — a process where textile layers and hand-couched fibers are applied over an abstract painting, allowing the underlying composition to emerge through the textile surface.