The Great Red Barn 1985

Eyvind Earle made this screen print, The Great Red Barn, with flat planes of colour and sharp contrasts. Imagine Earle, with a squeegee in hand, pulling ink across the screen, carefully layering each colour to build up the composition. The barn jumps out in bold, almost cartoon-like, red. It feels so American. The vertical lines giving it depth, next to stark black trees, all angular and a bit spooky. I wonder if Earle was thinking of Hopper's isolated houses when he made this. Both use light and shadow to create a sense of mood, but Earle's is more graphic, more stylized. Maybe he was trying to find a balance between abstraction and representation, simplifying forms to their essence but still making them recognizable? Painters, illustrators, we’re all in conversation with each other, remixing and reinterpreting the world around us.