Helen Eager: High Noon (After the Wall)

They hang around for a long while and you don’t want to rush them because you don’t want to overdo them. It’s really hard to decide on a point when they are finished – and sometimes it means just another really really thin layer of a certain colour over one piece or two pieces.

Finally, Helen paints the white. She claims that she just hasn’t figured out another way of maintaining the pristine edges of the triangles, of keeping the ground clean. But it would be fair to say that her work owes som of its potency to the animated quality of these ‘grounds’. Unlike the triangles, which, because they are painted quite evenly using a paper template, have a “blank” surface, the white is painterly – look close and you can see the brush strokes.2 Helen says, “I like to paint the lines by hand, even though it is arduous, because I just like painting.”

I am reminded of her obstinacy in insisting on painting the edges of her earlier ‘Angle’ paintings by hand – perfectly straight divides between colours mapped out by following the fall of a piece of string.

I always ask Helen to give me some idea of what is going through her mind, what kind of “mental state” she is in, when she paints like this. For some reason it fascinates me. I’m sure it’s all a little bit Zen. “You are just there and that’s what you’re doing,” she tells me, “you really do focus in very closely.”

I can’t help but think of Helen’s movement into abstraction in the late 1980s and the way she describes it as a process of “focussing in”, as the objects in her interior scenes became bigger and bigger. “I focused in to corners where the light shines off a teapot or a piece of furniture…

2 Helen says that the “blank” or all-over texture of her triangles comes in part from the original crayon drawings that comprised the 2005 series ‘New Directions’, which were essentially her first foray into this ongoing composition of chains of triangles on white. “I like the all all-overness of the drawing, how the texture is the same all over. And trying to paint the same texture all over a triangle that has little points in it… I was finding it frustrating, so I was playing around with different ways of doing it, like putting an under-colour on over the whole canvas and then painting the white on it. Then I just decided that I would use a template, pieces of paper, so that I could paint evenly to the edge. That’s not unlike a printing technique called pochoir where you have a little template, then you get a brush and stamp your colour over it. So I was sort of referring back to my printing discipline.”