Painting Palettes
Painting Palettes
This work strives to explore the consequences of Eatock’s literal, circular thinking to the activity of painting. By setting up an equivalence between palette and canvas, the project creates a compelling ambiguity between paint as a subject and paint as a medium. In addition to depicting the specific source and substance from which it is made, each work complicates assumed differences between abstraction and representation, image and object. Deceptively simple, the work is remarkable for all the complexities it proposes.
Seen initially at a distance, it is possible to consider the wall mounted canvases as abstract paintings, a reading that remains possible for some examples even at close range. Considered as a group the works can be interpreted more readily as images of palettes.
These paintings are the result of a first project given to first year painting students with the goal of activating awareness about the medium’s subjects, materials and techniques. Richard Torchia
