Shepherds Delight

Hannah Eavis

The paintings of Hannah Eavis contain an exciting collaboration of texture, colour, and mark-making. Each of these aspects fights for dominance, and the effect is an energic dynamism. Fast, deliberate scrawls of paint and pastel dance across the surface, disrupting the equilibrium of blended flat colour. Evidence of layering can be seen in the dried, dripped texture hidden beneath washes of oil paint and dry-brush scrapes of colour. Each layer seems to aggravate the last – pushing, futilely, for authority. Similarly, vapid, soporific tones clash with loud, obnoxious flashes of luminous colour - pushing and pulling against each other. The result is a fantastic play of texture, colour, and form. Furthermore, Eavis occasionally experiments with semi-abstract figuration in her work to which themes of familiarity and abstraction intermingle and push the relationship of form and materiality. Eavis’ work exhibits an interest in the artistic process suggestive of contemporary artist Richard Aldrich who wrote, in 2006, that “painting is an illustration, or proof rather, that a creative force exists.” This is true of Eavis’ work, which tactically builds layers of colour and marks to transform and reveal the process of creation.