Artistry
Strokes of Brilliance
of tiny, detailed brush strokes as well as Cézanne’s more heavily worked brush Hovering somewhere between Many of her works display her abstraction and reality, Eva Lundsager’s strokes.” own broad knowledge of and love for vivid, color-saturated canvases evoke a the history of painting. “It’s a language I admire,” she says. sense of both familiarity and adventure. The fifty-eight-year-old Lundsager earned a BA in art from the University of Maryland Page through Eva Lundsager’s rich, varied, and her MFA from Hunter College, and received a and colorful portfolio of her much-praised Guggenheim Fellowship in painting. Her work has work over the last thirty years, and it’s clear why one been featured in numerous one-woman and group reviewer noted, “Lundsager takes advantage of everything paint can do.” The artist, who lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and has a studio in nearby Somerville, brushes, drips, pours, layers, glazes, and “doodles” paint to produce her abstract works. “I love to experiment with paint,” she says. “I may begin a painting by laying a stretched canvas on the floor and dripping very liquid paint onto it; then I’ll lift it or turn it to let the paint drip upward, as if it is defying gravity. After it’s dry, I may place paint over paint and add tiny brushstrokes as well as bolder swatches of paint. My work is all about mark making, spontaneity, and the possibilities—the freedom—of abstract art.” As she talks about her process, Lundsager describes being influenced by legendary artists and including “bits and pieces” of their techniques in her work. “I love Mark Rothko’s thin washes of paints, Morris Louis’s streaks, Helen Frankenthaler’s use
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
LEFT: In All the Lands (2017), oil on canvas, 20”H × 16”W; Never Been Seen (2015), oil on canvas, 20”H × 16”W; Within Sight (2017), oil on linen, 54”H × 66”W.
| BY ROBERT KIENER | 28 New England Home | July–August 2018
JA18 Artistry.indd 28
Photos by Stewart Clements
5/22/18 12:19 AM