Biography
Born in Dublin. Raised between Ireland and Malibu, California. Working from the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts since 1998 — with regular returns to Connemara and County Monaghan.
Olwen O'Herlihy Dowling spent the first half of her working life in the professional theatre — over two decades as a producer, managing director, stage manager, and scenery designer. She produced new plays in Dublin, in regional American theatre, and on Cape Cod. The discipline of staging — the patience for craft, the readiness to be surprised by what materials want to do — became the foundation of everything that followed.
In her early forties she made the transition fully to the visual arts. She has described it not as a break but as a return: a coming back to what she had always meant to be doing. The work since has been continuous — printmaking at Zea Mays in Florence, Massachusetts; oil and watercolor painting from her studio in North Chester; residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
She holds a BA from Smith College in studio art and biology, and trained in printmaking at L'Ecole d'Art in Vallauris, France. The biology has resurfaced lately. Recent work attends to plant life, to birds in decline, to the specific ecological present of the two landscapes she has been looking at all her life.
A Working Chronology
D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Print Gallery, Springfield MA. The most extensive institutional showing of the work to date — monotype prints and etchings exploring Irish-American identity and the felt sense of belonging to multiple places. Through October 4, 2026.
Multiple residencies at the Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland — a sustained engagement with the western Irish landscape over many years.
Florence, Massachusetts. Long-standing intaglio practice as part of the Zea Mays cooperative — the discipline at the center of the studio.
Time and space to make new work — one of several fellowships supporting the practice.
A career-long transition: more than two decades in the professional theatre — as producer, managing director, stage manager, and scenery designer — before turning fully to the visual arts.
BA in Studio Art and Biology from Smith. Print and ceramic studies in the south of France.
Most days the studio holds three simultaneous practices — a print on the press, a painting on the easel, a watercolor at the table. The choice between them is rarely strategic. Some subjects ask for the slow patience of intaglio; others for the speed and chance of monotype; others for the wet immediacy of oil. The job is to listen.
Turner, Cassatt, Homer, Diebenkorn, Sorolla — painters of light and water and edges, working in the long tradition Olwen identifies with. The contemporary printmakers of Zea Mays. The Irish landscape tradition. The biology shelf in the studio.
Private collections in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. Galleries throughout western Massachusetts and in Dublin. The Zea Mays Flat File Project, ongoing.