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Michael Eade
What are my paintings? Lush, fanciful landscapes abundant with flora and sometimes inhabited by spiritual beings and beasts.
But my paintings are not fantasies. They are instead a re-composition of images taken from religious and non-religious art; from Eastern and Western cultures spanning across many art historical periods, and images of nature and the environment we live in. I encounter these images in my daily life, when I travel on holiday, in a book, in a museum, on a page of a magazine. They are transformed and reappear in a spiritual world I create - different yet vaguely familiar.
It interests me that even with familiar imagery each person brings his or her own personal interpretation. Familiar imagery opens the door to an alternate type of experience of symbolic understanding and feelings. My paintings are meant to facilitate this form of reaction . Even though viewers ay not be concretely familiar with al the sources - it doesn't matter, because each individual is drawn to some aspect that appeals to their own personal culture, and I invite individual reinterpretations of the images.
The materials and manner in which I construct my paintings also create a familiarity for the viewer. Viewers often comment they perceive influences of Christian religious paintings, Asian landscape art and Persian miniatures. Like the images I choose, these too have been reprocessed through my personal interpretations. The composition and color palette of my paintings are procured strictly from my intuition. Traditional colors and spatial concepts are sometimes disregarded to heighten the visual experience of the viewer pulling and leading the viewer's eye.
My work is not political or philosophical. It is personal. My work invites viewers to embark on visual tours of an unknown yet familiar looking world aimed at becoming a part of their cultural and emotional consciousness.
