Alumni Morgan Dyer (’13) & Maura O’Connor (’15) Appear On HGTV’s Farmhouse Fixer

Frequent viewers of HGTV might have noticed some familiar faces this year. Or, if not familiar faces, maybe some familiar work! Alumni Morgan Dyer and Maura O’Connor both made appearances on the show Farmhouse Fixer, which premiered this March. It is a home renovation show centered around the old farmhouses that dot the towns of Northeastern Massachusetts. The two Montserrat alumni were hired—independently—to paint murals in two of the homes under renovation.

Dyer and O’Connor appeared in the second and sixth episodes, respectively, and the spotlight represents another step in the steady growth of both artists in their professional paths post-Montserrat. Dyer was hired to bring her signature bold, swooping colors to a home in Gloucester. O’Connor, on the other hand, was brought to Essex to paint a mural in a style harkening back to historic folk artists like Grandma Moses.

The experience required a change of process for both of them, though in remarkably different ways. Dyer, who often works on large canvases and had recently moved her studio spaces outdoors, found herself scaling down to fit into a cozy, farmhouse bathroom.

“My normal practice is mostly 2D and generally made on the ground. I pour and I wait for things to dry and I pour another layer. You really have to plan out mural work to make sure it works in the space. Whatever mark you’re making on one side you need to have a plan for the other.”

It was not the tightest environment Dyer’s ever found herself working in. That would be the dentist office in Beverly that had her painting around their $100,000 X-Ray machine. But that past experience also helped her contextualize her process within this current project.

“I understand that at this point in my career I need to treat it very similar to a painting. It took me about a year or two to really understand my process, and to know my mural work really cannot be planned.”  The owner of the home ended up loving the final result so much that she asked Dyer to come back and sign it when she next got the chance.

O’Connor was hired to paint a 12 x 4½ foot living room wall and found herself having to scale up significantly compared to her usual illustrative work. Thematically, though, it fit very well within the rest of O’Connor’s oeuvre. Her usual art stretches from house portraits, to botanical-inspired illustrations, to work influenced by folk traditions, like her Tarot Series. So this particular call—for a muralist who could bring modern quality to folk art composition—was a natural fit.

“I’ve gotten a longstanding history now of doing house portraits, especially around the holidays. Because the farmhouse in the mural was going to be such a focal point, I was able to take the compositional foundation I’d picked up from those house portraits and use what I learned to lay out the piece.”

Her aptitude for the work is perhaps even less surprising, given that O’Connor just last year moved to a to Central New York, into a landscape not altogether dissimilar from the one she painted onto the wall of that Essex farmhouse.

Like Dyer, O’Connor found herself needing to adapt her usual practice in order to bring her work to a new scale, albeit in the opposite direction. Bridging her own style and scale with what the homeowner and designer wanted required some very detailed planning.

“I drew a series of 12” by 12” squares on the wall, and then made a corresponding grid onto poster board with my sketches on it. So I was really only working on one square foot at a time. Once I had the plan together and the sketches up on the wall, it felt almost like a coloring book.”

Both Dyer and O’Connor were working on these murals in the early Fall of 2020, before any of the COVID-19 vaccines had become widely (or even sparsely) available. As a result, most of the painting was done at night or on the weekends, after most of the crews responsible for construction and renovation had left. Dyer recalled waiting outside for the filming to finish and the population of the house to thin out before going inside to do her own work. O’Connor would let herself slip into a groove with the help of Game of Thrones audiobooks.

The first season of Farmhouse Fixer is finished (O’Connor’s was the season finale), though it’s still frequently aired on HGTV, and viewable on their website. Dyer and O’Connor, of course, are not; both have spent the past year enmeshed in interesting projects shaped by the unusual nature of the last 18 months. Check back later this month for part 2 of our dual profile!

In the meantime, be sure to check out Morgan and Maura’s respective websites to take a look at some more of their amazing work. They can also be found on Instagram at @morganrdyer and @oconnoisseur, respectively.