Eleanor Louise Butt
Slippages and Tensions
I visited Eleanor’s studio in the Dandenong Ranges on a beautiful autumn day in May. The recently completed studio sits adjacent to the house, with doors opening out to untamed bush at the edge of the property. The afternoon light filtered through the trees, reflecting off leaves changing colour with the season, and as we talked, the sun moved across the sky, playing with the shadows on the earth. Hung on the walls and stacked around the studio were paintings in various stages of completion. I recognised in the surrounding landscape the colours that appear on Eleanor’s paint palettes and in her paintings – greens and browns, burnt umber, orange, gold and yellow – and the movement of light and shadow that shift across her canvases. Eleanor poured us cups of peppermint tea while Mabel, the black border collie, found a sunny patch on the studio floor and settled in for a nap. The soft notes of music playing from a speaker mingled with the sounds of birds singing and squawking outside. I felt myself easing into relaxation and I understood the meditative flow state that Eleanor must enter as she engages in a practice of material experimentation and improvisation. I feel it is important to set this scene because I understand Eleanor’s practice to be grounded in a phenomenological understanding of the world. Phenomenology proposes that meaning is derived from an individual’s lived experience – what we see, taste, smell, touch, hear and feel – and Eleanor’s works are imbued with these multiple layers of experience.
In the studio, the artist’s internal perceptions, emotions, memories, and her engagement with art history are given voice through materials and tools, touch and time. Slippages and tensions arise between abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, movement and stillness, in a joyful interplay of colour and form. Eleanor says of her paintings: “My works are improvised in the moment, with room for ambiguity, accidents, failure, and chance to play a part in an embodied process of creation and excavation.”[i] Her artworks function as sites for asking questions of painting; a key question being how, through painting, she can communicate experience and sensation. I picture the solitary painter in an ongoing encounter between tool and material – paintbrush and paint – trying to capture something so intangible. It is the slippery nature of painting, the hard-to-pin-down-ness of it, that keeps the painter returning to the canvas time and again.
Eleanor is a painter who has an endless fascination and appreciation for painters, paintings, and the act of painting. Books are stacked throughout her studio, and Eleanor passes me several, showing me examples of artists and paintings that excite her: Betty Parsons, Albert Oehlen, Amy Sillman, Pat Passlof and Henry Moore. One book at the top of a pile has yellow post-it-notes fanning from its pages. ‘What Painting Is’, by American art historian and art critic James Elkins, is a book that explores the act of painting through the lens of alchemy. I flick through the pages and my eyes land on these resonant words: “Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts… Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.”[ii]
Elkins continues, “Despite all its bad press and its association with quackery and nonsense, alchemy is the best and most eloquent way to understand how paint can mean: how it can be so entrancing, so utterly addictive, so replete with expressive force, that it can keep hold of an artist’s attention for an entire lifetime.”[iii] Alchemy, now widely acknowledged as a predecessor of modern chemistry, is concerned with the transmutation of matter. The association with painting therefore makes sense, because painters are also concerned with the transmutation of paint into something greater than its purely material properties: to imbue the paint with meaning. This is true of Eleanor’s works. You can’t help but feel something when you encounter them.
Presented alongside the oil paintings are a series of handmade bronze sculptures, or paintings in three dimensions. The process of lost wax bronze casting is also a form of alchemy: the transmutation of gesture captured in soft warm wax, which holds its form as it hardens and cools, transformed into a silicon mould and then into bronze. The wax casts are made quickly with hands, sculpting tools and paint brushes, capturing intuitive and playful gestures that “hold a moment”.[iv] Placed together, the paintings and sculptures speak to each other; a translation of a conversation between two and three dimensions.
— Laura Couttie, June 2024
[i] Email correspondence with the artist, June 2024.
[ii] James Elkins, What Painting Is, Routledge, 2000, p. 5.
[iii] Ibid., p. 7.
[iv] Conversation with the artist, May 2024.