EXHIBITION: THE INNER YEARNING

When Dion Archibald asked Belinda Eaton in an interview why she chose to be an artist, she replied, “Because it implies choice and I don’t feel I have one. For me the process of not expressing myself creatively through the use of colour, the mark of the brush and the creation of images and movement on a canvas would leave me feeling dead.” Eaton’s recent solo show at the Canvas Gallery was like a feast of colour, design and painterly energy that we hardly get to see at galleries in Karachi.

The intensity of Eaton’s painterliness is striking for many reasons, one being that the artist has had a long sojourn with painting. She has developed her narrative and sustained it from the 1990s to date. But why is it that when standing in front of the paintings we seem to be in awe as if viewing her painting for the very first time? The answer is that her painting is so striking that it literally takes one’s breath away. It has the fluidity that transports one into a world where people are consumed by glamorous fashion in hip social settings.

The core idea seems to be drawn from people in what appears like clubs and bars, photographed in a moment when they stop briefly, as if to pay attention to the viewer — as if someone is finally listening to them . The instance when a stranger becomes a friend is thus recorded. The artist is inclusive of oddities around her and conveying different, even awkward and private, moments of these people who are glaring at her and the viewer. She says that she paints the eyes at the end, because that is when her protagonists really make that connection with the viewer. There is pain as well as comfort here, empathy not different from the way Iqbal Hussain has painted the women at Lahore’s Heera Mandi area.

Belinda Eaton’s art transports one into a world of glamour and a hip society

Eaton’s subjects, however, belong to another place, at a party surrounded by the sound of music, food and cross conversations that never end. It is a very European space, where the public and the private are not separate from each other. There is an openness that is visible where all sorts of people meet, perhaps also by chance, and spaces where new conversations may begin.

It is a claustrophobic space, especially since Eaton paints people either as if they are about to walk out of the picture into the gallery or fall out of the frame of the painting. The artist’s fixation on faces, some of which are painted on an unexpectedly large scale, conveys her as a storyteller who reveals herself through her subjects. The painting of a woman with striking blonde hair moves into a painterly fluidity where the model appears distant in her gaze, but the viewer is confronted with the immediacy of brushstrokes that take on a life regardless of her. The bold gestural movement exudes a form that is free of the subject in front of us, as the paint is applied in submission to an inner yearning. In that way, it is illogical and, yet, poetic.

Eaton’s work elicits an almost spiritual or humanist embrace, much like Mark Rothko’s fields of colour. And contrary to the sound of music and conversation that one can almost hear from the surroundings where her subjects are situated, there is a reflective manner which contains her paint and imagery. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) site describes that Rothko “sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears.” “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on,” he said. Eaton has mentioned the influence of Rothko in her work. Her paintings, therefore, seem to not only be depictions of persons and places grounded in the visual traditions of Western art but draw inspiration from those who moved beyond them. “Art is an anecdote of the spirit,” said Rothko.