BRIDGE
“These are the photographs I would have hoped to paint.”
- DAVID EUSTACE
An iron bridge, exposed to acid rain, frost, graffiti, repair, vandalism, pollution and wear becomes a paradigm for human experience but also for a painter’s technique. The scouring, building up and removing of material, dripping and throwing of paint and even the chance or ‘automatic’ so welcomed in dada practice, are all in the armoury of the painter who recognises that texture is part of the abstract. Eustace’s discovery of such a bridge in West London led him to make a series of abstract, painterly images in one day which are no less about time passing than the Harris works, but whose creation cemented for the artist a deep connection with painting. His subsequent ‘discovery’ of a parallel aesthetic in aspects in the work of Keith Vaughan and Morandi proved charming and con rmatory:
the elegy of time passing, of emerging change, tonal subtlety and layering of texture could be constructed of captured.
- GUY PEPLOE
