Tartan

Bella Easton’s intricate, obsessively crafted paintings employ a hybrid of painting and printmaking techniques. Each composition is constructed around a grid structure in an attempt to formalise the subject. By further complicating each paintings construction, the connection between image and pattern is explored. The decorative detailing of the subject is often layered over a painted, patterned foundation or a previous image. The painterly seduction embraces abstraction and figuration, where sections of the composition appear real and others more fragmented, as if melting into the canvas surface.
Architecture underpins her work, often painting places close to where she lives and works in South London - such as the grided tower blocks that embrace formal repetition or rows of terraced houses, fragmented by a random, lacy web of silhouetted branches in the foreground. There is a deliberate intent to make the subject ‘cinematic’, through an atmospheric and evocative depiction of social landscapes. The images are cropped creating ambiguity and tension. The relationship between what may have once seemed ordinary and everyday is given a sense of importance and permanence, the real and familiar becomes bizarre, dreamlike and staged.