Eileen Hale

My Painting a Day Blog
My Art Blog
My Website (not yet up)

The two primary areas of my art are: 1) my personal art, and 2) animal portraits (and sometimes human portraits) on commission.

My personal art ranges from fairly pure abstract work - dynamic, restless and shifting, full of motion and emotion, in watercolor, oils and collage - to work that combines figurative, abstract/abstract expressionist and surrealist styles in the same painting, with a dreamlike mix of content. I love color and flow, and I think my work is energetic, and graceful and refined as well as boisterous, naive, playful and clumsy. My vision is to bring many viewpoints together, in a harmony that is not too settled a harmony; I love the counterpoint as well as the harmony, the texture and variety. In the country of my work, I don't strive for a single official language, or ethnic purity. I welcome a cast of thousands, immigrants from all over. When all this comes together, the result I see is a vivid aliveness in the painting.

In my portrait commissions, done in charcoal, watercolor or oil, I'm also focusing on the sense of the animal's aliveness, and the person that that animal is. I focus on the feel of the animal: the texture of fur, the shape of a forehead; the squashiness of a flopped-out cat; the dynamics of this being, alive in motion, pursuing its own agenda. I work from photographs, and I usually work in considerable detail; at the same I want my paintings and renderings to celebrate the feel of paint or the texture of drawing, rather than trying to have a photographic look.

I have also started a Painting a Day Blog, though I'm not yet painting and posting anywhere near that frequently, and an Art Blog, which shows completed paintings and in-progress views.

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