Joan 1992

Eyvind Earle gave us Joan, and looking at her I get a clear sense of her being built from the process of laying down colour, line, and form. I love the watery violets, the way the pigment seems to float and pool across the surface, and the flat dense blacks of her hair. The thinness of the pigment and the lightness of the touch give her an ethereal and dreamy presence. I keep getting drawn back to the place on her sternum where Earle has left the blue bare, as though the lines have been drawn and then simply left to bleed. It makes me think of the places in our lives, and the places in our paintings, where we just stop, or where we leave things unresolved, and the beauty we can find there. Earle reminds me a little of Hilma af Klint, another artist preoccupied with revealing the hidden or unseen. It seems like he is interested in more than just depiction, searching for some kind of elemental essence.