After the death of his father from typhoid fever in 1900 he was brought up solely by his mother in Newcastle upon Tyne, and was educated as a lay boy at Ushaw College, a Roman Catholic seminary in County Durham.
Without an architect or builder and using the cheapest material he could find, concrete blocks made with sand from the site, he constructed an open-plan cruciform design which gave the minimum chance of the walls falling down.
Edquist notes that with his sculptural works, unlike his watercolours, O'Connell joined the trajectory of Modernism, not on the scale of the heroic avant-garde, but as domestically focussed craft-based Modernist.
[11] On his return from Europe O'Connell continued with the concrete garden furniture, and in 1930 started experimenting with lino-cuts, notably a long linen frieze, Pandemonium, one of his most significant works; it is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.
In 1934 an art critic wrote: As a master craftsman in the production of hand block-printed textiles, curtains, and fabrics, Michael O'Connell ranks among the best artists in Australia.
Many of these linens are beautiful in themselves, because of the nature of the designs and the quality of colour...others would depend to a considerable extent for their effect on the use that was made of them, the circumstances in which they were used, whether for hangings or coverings, and so belong to the second fabric class.
[16]O'Connell had already established himself at his house, Barbizon, a Modernist statement that gained him a place in Melbourne's avant-garde community, and a base of operations for his concrete garden furniture enterprise.
With his growing success with the fabrics it became a studio house, a destination for fellow artists, clients, journalists and the simply curious, written up and photographed in design journals, and where he and Ella hosted gatherings of the Arts and Crafts Society.
They built their new home, The Chase, at Perry Green, near Much Hadham, Hertfordshire next to sculptor Henry Moore, living meanwhile in a tent on site and producing some work to pay for its completion.
'[21]In World War II O'Connell served in the artillery at Dover and then was moved to the Royal Ordnance as an Inspector of Dangerous Buildings at a munitions factory in Chorley, Lancashire.
A Birmingham Post reviewer noted burlesques and fantasies on period themes, and in keeping with the war, an early English design showing St. George, triumphing over dragons.
[26] His imagery was influenced by, among others, Raoul Dufy and French tapestries, medieval pictorial conventions, as in the hangings depicting local villages, and theatrical stage sets.
Australian connections persisted - a commission for Australia House in London in 1947 and a large group of murals sent to Melbourne in 1952 for a solo exhibition at Georges department store.
[27] He was a foundation member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1946,[28] and became caught up in progressive and idealistic initiatives to enliven public and industrial environments, such as recreation rooms and canteens - motifs in hangings from this period often include plates of food.
Edquist writes that 'he drew stylistic inspiration from medieval painting, particularly the tradition of the 'labours of the month', estate maps and heraldry, which he skilfully hybridised with folk art and contemporary content'.
He used linocuts for repeated motifs, such as trees and foliage, while regionally specific elements such as barns and cattle were hand-draw in resist, as were the many tiny figures on tractors, feeding hens, having a cup of tea, or whatever.
[35] After their display the panels toured New Zealand and Australia before being acquired by MERL, where they were used as backdrops to their tents at country shows before being put into storage and forgotten until 1998, when they were rediscovered and researched by curator Jill Betts.
Henrion gave him further commissions, notably for the Time-Life Building in New Bond Street in London a series of column motif curtains across the south wall of the reception area.
He produced designs for Heal's printed fabrics, and Henry Rothschild, another admirer of his work, displayed his hangings in his Primavera arts and crafts gallery shops in Sloane Street London and King's Parade Cambridge.
[43] It is featured in Tanya Harrod's Disorder in the World of Work : The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century[44] and in 1999 was included in the Pleasures of Peace exhibition which accompanied its publication.
For his own work he appropriated African motifs such as masks, totems, and animals, arranging them in columns and grids which could be combined with an abstract vocabulary of dots, lines, and circles in various ways for cushions, curtains, and other furnishing fabrics.
His main teaching commitment was at Ware College of Further Education, nearby in Hertfordshire, where his good friend John Tobin was an art teacher and ensured that he was on the staff from 1968.
[58] On 13 May 1970 two students, in O'Connell's absence, were at The Chase were heating wax on a paraffin stove which left unattended and caught fire burning the timber-framed workshop to the ground, scorching the wall next of the house and damaging part of the roof.
[59] Friends rallied round to support him, and by June work had started on rebuilding, much of it done by O'Connell himself, despite his being seventy-two at the time, and by August he was back in the house and by November it was more or less restored.
Edquist says that in this period his works lacked the thematic consistency that characterised the previous decades and ranged through whimsical figures, abstract and bright dot designs, mandalas, biblical themes, and reprisals of English kings and queens; O'Connell sensed a new mood driving the craft revival of the 1970s, and that the Heal's buyers "didn't want their collection spoilt by my odd-man-out contribution".
Having planned to return to New Mexico and Canada in the summer of 1976 he cancelled the trip due to his visual impairment and instead he spent some time travelling in the UK, staying with friends Christopher Heal and Henry Rothschild, and visiting galleries in London, and others joined him at The Hoops.
[64] Edquist writes that he had planned suicide in August 1973, when he was struggling with depression, thoughts which recurred in the next three years and in diary entry for 26 November, shortly before his death; "The inevitable is ahead, but face it cheerfully as was so in the 2 wars.
[66] At the time of the inquest John Tobin, head of Ware College art school was reported as saying O'Connell's "death was a great loss to the local community.
She wrote in the introduction: Over the many years of friendship I came more and more to admire his overflowing inventiveness (which he kept right up to the end of his life), his inspired facility with the medium of batik itself and his wit and his humour which came out so much in his work.
While he inwardly railed against what he saw as increasing discrimination against his kind of craft and while he saw little joy in a world increasingly dominated by violence and war, he did not waver in his belief in the value of his work as a craftsman.Edquist quotes Richard Sennett on Heidegger's discussion of humans seeking to return to dwelling more simply in nature: 'a famous image in these writings of Heidegger'a old age invokes "a hut in the Black Forest" to which the philosopher withdraws, limiting his place in the world to the satisfaction of simple needs.