Tall Trees 1987

Eyvind Earle conjured these 'Tall Trees' with layers of colour forming these beautiful, highly stylised shapes. It's not quite abstract, not quite representational, but it's absolutely, totally its own thing. It's the texture that gets me going, these tiny details which build into an optical experience. The density of colour is amazing, but it’s the mark making that holds the key, and how that relates to the forms themselves. Look closely, and you'll see how those myriad tiny dashes and dots, almost like a pointillist dream, combine to create depth and volume. The light seems to emanate from within. There is something very interesting about how Earle’s landscapes prefigure computer graphics, an entirely different approach to picture making, like the screens we now look at every day. This reminds me of the way David Hockney moved between painting and photography, seeing each medium as a way to expand his own vision. Art isn’t just about what we see, but about how we come to see in the first place.