Dinner on the Grass 1984

Eric Massholder made this oil painting, Dinner on the Grass, with a palette that feels both earthy and otherworldly. The figures are rendered in warm tones, like they’ve been baking in the sun, or maybe pulled from the soil itself. The texture is key here. You can almost feel the weight of the paint, the way it builds up in layers to create these figures lounging around a fire. I’m drawn to the way the faces are rendered with what looks like white masks. There’s this tension between the rough, tactile quality of the paint and the smooth, mask-like faces, it’s a kind of distortion that makes you question what you're seeing. The flickering fire is painted with such immediacy and kind of childlike simplicity. Massholder reminds me a little of Milton Avery, who was also a master of simplified forms and colour. Both artists embrace the joy of artmaking and leave space for ambiguity.