CATALOGS

Michael Eade was selected for inclusion in Timeless: The Art of Drawing, an exhibition at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, which ran from September 30th to December 21st, 2008. The exhibition centered on the ideas of the direct relationship between the artist and the medium which transfers a sense of spontaneity and risk to the act of drawing as well as the notion of drawing as a primitive means of artistic expression that continues to be practiced.

The exhibition was organized by Ann Aptaker, the museum curator, and is accompanied by a catalogue.

September 30th - December 21st, 2008

Bickford and Bush Compton Galleries

...an exhibition catalog is available

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(Above) Illustration in the catalog of Eade's painting METHUSELAH, 2003. One of three paintings by Eade included in the exhibition co-curated by Mary Dinaburg and Jim Clark.

Michael Eade

Exotic Reverie

By Saul Ostrow

(Essay Excerpted from Group Exhibition Catalog for If You Were Here, September 2004 - February 2005, Lexington Arts & Cultural Council, Lexington, KY; Gallery w52 - The Lobby Gallery, New York, NY; Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX)

We all have a need to escape the mundane gray reality of everyday life. Reciprocally, we have all heard stories of people just walking away - running away to some exotic place and going "native." They settle into what they imagine to be a more basic life in a simpler environment, some place out there that still holds out the promise of being paradise. What is desired of such places is another type of intensity; one of sensuous and spiritual delights rather than stress and anxiety. For those who cannot make the break with civilization, art often supplies a type of armchair escape. Think of Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti, Henri Rousseau's imaginary jungles, Matisse and Delacroix's visions of North Africa or Frederick Church's paintings of South American jungles - all of this offers the viewer a line of flight.

Similarly, Michael Eade's paintings offer us a beguiling and alluring escape route. His brightly colored and often strange landscapes are neither somewhere "else," nor are they solely the product of fantasies and visions. Instead, populated with near surreal events, Eade's aggressively colored, complex compositions are carefully conceived constructs whose pictorial elements are drawn from the art of both Eastern and Western cultures. By combining his sophisticated knowledge of the traditional methods and materials of early Christian painting, Asian art and Persian art, along with the stylistic appeal of the simple and direct manner of an outsider, Eade produces an aesthetic which is structurally and stylistically intuitive and personal, without becoming expressionist or painterly.

Looking at Eade's vistas of tangled patterns of flora and fauna awash in the high-key color of a fauvist palette, we are in turn offered an excursion into a "lost world" of allegory and metaphor. This stylistic recasting allows Eade to conceptually reprogram the emotional and psychological substance of his sources making them at once vaguely familiar and alien. This sampling also contributes to the symbolic meaning of Eade's work. Ironically, his stylistic inventions also undermine his pictorial references to other artists and their works. This confrontation between what to put into the painting and how, makes the possible meaning of each work at once speculative and indeterminate. Consequently, Eade's works are at once an index of the pastoral delights and flights of fancy as he envisions them, as well as a sampling of the enigmatic and exotic collective unconscious that art makes real for us.

Saul Ostrow is Dean of Visual Arts and Technologies, as well as Chair of Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Since 1995 he has been the Editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture which was originally published by G+B Arts International and now is published by Routledge, London. Prof. Ostrow is the Art Editor for Bomb Magazine, Co-Editor of Lusitania Press and consulting editor to the University of Minn. Press. Saul Ostrow has curated over 60 exhibitions since 1986.

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(Above) Illustration in the catalog of Eade's painting STUDY FOR GENESIS GARDEN, 2002.

Michael Eade

By Calvin Reid

(Essay Excerpted from Group Exhibition Catalog for Dancing In the Dark: Aljira Emerge, 2002- Exhibition: May - July, 2003, Aljira Center For Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ)

Eade's paintings envelop the viewer in a burst of eye-popping color and a succession of vaguely familiar imagery that leaps and bounds across art historical periods. Eade's ravishing egg tempera paintings offer a fantastic iconographic vision encompassing hints of early Christian religious painting, Persian miniatures, Asian art, modernist expressionism, science fiction, and pop imagery recombined in an improvised painterly cornucopia. Eade's lavishly colorful works feature striking allusions to the art of the East and the West as well as that of the past and the present. His current works offer an equally eclectic embrace of historical landscape styles—with dramatic skies, broad surfaces of color and texture, and clusters of decorative forests and plants—teasing and tantalizing our understanding of painting's history with a stylish mix of iconographic tributes.

Calvin Reid is a critic and writer for Art In America and Bomb magazines, and selected Michael Eade as a fellow for the now well known Aljira Emerge Fellowship Program.

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Michael Eade

By James Clark

(Essay Excerpted from Solo Exhibition Catalog for Michael Eade - Between Heaven And Earth, July - August, 2001, Triangle Gallery, Sinclair College, Dayton, OH)

Somewhere between Heaven and Earth, Michael Eade has created his own unique realm. His six-eyed aliens, strange beasts and highly stylized flora suggest a non-earthly place... perhaps it is The Garden. But, the garden as we mortals know it, is contrived nature; it is man's attempt to bring order and perspective into his world. Based on his own personal experiences and learning, Michael has created a place where order is established through a rich array of visual imagery.

Consistent in his vocabulary, Michael has established a narrative that continues to develop and expand. More and more is revealed about this strange world with each new painting. Like a cosmic anthropologist who stumbled upon fragments of pottery and wall paintings of a long lost race, Michael has been piecing together the clues to construct this realm. Starting with only a basic set of the iconographic objects, i.e. the comet, the ladder, the pitcher, etc., the work grew to include tableaus in which the beings manifested themselves. Lounging by tranquil fountains, playing games in the garden, Michael's beings existed within a tightly controlled framework. Finally, the full world-view has come into sight. The six-eyed beings have looked over the garden wall into the wild and unknown.

Fantastic and strange as Michael's world is, there is something familiar about these beings as well as the flora and fauna. As the artist notes, he has been influenced by, and has borrowed heavily from art history and sacred iconography. On first encounter, one might be seduced by the colors, the gold gilding and the illustration-like quality to the work, but one is coaxed into looking deeper. If one is familiar with the different source materials referenced in the work, s/he might be tempted to decode the canvas in an effort to make sense of this strange realm.

Like an anthropologist, Michael brings to his work his own world-view and beliefs which color the objects/symbols under his employ. But, unlike the anthropologist, the artist is not attempting to “reconstruct,” he is creating. Referencing early Christian mysticism, traditional Christian iconography, Islamic texts and patterns, Japanese landscapes, and even the 1970s television show “Lost in Space,” Michael has altered, rearranged and redefined these symbols to tell his own story.

Michael has assembled a Jungian dream landscape in which the viewer is left to his or her own devices to identify and interpret that which appears to be classical imagery or universal symbols. It is clear, however, Michael is not burdened by the religious or academic interpretations, rather, he selects these images by intuition and their visual appeal making the work all the richer for the various meanings one might ascribe to it.

James Clark is the President and CEO of the Lexington Arts & Cultural Council in Lexington, KY. In 2001, when this exhibition and catalog were presented Mr. Clark was the President and CEO of Culture Works in Dayton, OH.