|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
Book Release |
|||
|
Ivan Eyre Drawings |
|||
 |
|||
|
|
This beautiful hardcover book has 250 full colour plates of rarely seen Ivan Eyre Drawings. The text is both compelling and candid. It is an interview between the artist and Tom Lovatt. Interspersed within the text are beautiful and personal photos of Eyre and his family. This is a wonderful book celebrating one of Canada's most significant artists. $47.99 |
||
Ivan Eyre, Stephanie Middagh and Tom Lovatt |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Tom |
Ivan |
||
| Does drawing function as a more immediate means of getting to what you feel is in there? | It does more immediately than, for example, the anticipation of a landscape painting. That reality may consist of the slow accumulation of memories. But in drawing I shape the images in a very explicit and immediate way. The development of a landscape is an ongoing process of readjustment, whereas the drawing images come unfettered and full-blown early into the work. | ||
|
Tom |
Ivan |
||
| Is that because the elements you are using are more limited - a pencil and piece of paper as compared to color and paint? | Yes, there are just fewer distractions and I don't have to move around much. I have a few instruments in a small area. In working on a large painting, it becomes a studio experience with more pauses and distractions between each thought. The big figure paintings, though, are based on the drawing more directly so a large part of the work is already established. Therefore some of the intensity seen in the drawings has been spread out in the painted version. | ||
|
Tom |
Ivan |
||
| When you come to do a painting, are you striving for a fairly exact transcription of the drawing or does the act of painting take you away from the drawing and lead you elsewhere? | Yes, it does often lead elsewhere. I think I suggested before that the preparatory drawing shapes the imagery and the color often remains gentle, purposely played down so that when the drawing is established in the painting the introduction of new color is a surprise. Color becomes the excitement that makes up for having transferred established imagery. If I painted my fully-colored drawings the procedure would be somewhat redundant. | ||
|
The growth of my landscape paintings connects with
my drawings in a strange way. The landscape paintings develop more like the drawing
experience even though there are most often no figures in them. I embark on a landscape as an unknown, the same way that I begin a drawing, so that when I move through the
painting of the landscape and develop that space, it's not unlike moving through a figure in one of
my drawings. The discovery and forms in each idiom are related. The overall space in a
landscape painting becomes the replacement for the figure. In the landscapes,
that space becomes a chief preoccupation, whereas, in the figure drawing, it is not so much the overall space but rather the space within each figure. With the landscape, there is no one correct land formation, no internal set of relationships like you find in a figure, with its two arms and a head and so on. If you draw two heads on one body you raise a real content subject issue. In the landscape there is less of a corresponding requirement. One has the freedom to arrange and rearrange, with the possible exception of having to deal with the horizon. |
|||
|
The book is available at the Pavilion Gallery. |
|||
|
For more
information, |
|||
