Eleanor Conover, "Run-On"

Artist Statement

My work considers painting as a physical and material site for the mediation of space and experience. These smaller works are paintings I make before or after larger paintings, which are often made with irregular supports. The geometry in the studies refers to the edges of these supports, as well as to the imagined built space behind the canvas. In both, I suggest an imperfect or slanted relationship to the modernist/cartesian grid, as well as to the idealized horizon line of landscape painting. I think of the relationship of paint to weight, and the heaviness and lightness of objects, colors, materials. I also consider painting’s close relationship to mark-making or sign-making exercises including drawing and written language. By extension this also involves the space between letters, the pause between speaking, the space in between the tree branches, the shapes created in the negative space of the stretcher bar constructions.

Artist Bio

Born in Hartford, CT in 1988, Conover received her MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her BA from Harvard College. Most recently her work has been shown at Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY) and Bad Water (Knoxville, TN). Her work has been supported through artist residencies including Vermont Studio Center, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. With an interest in land and environment, she has additionally been involved in the research of geologic histories in Philadelphia, PA, and visual work regarding ecological histories in places as remote as the Aleutian Islands, AK. She received a post-MFA teaching fellowship at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is a recipient of the 2021 Alice C. Cole Fellowship at Wellesley College. She lives in Carlisle, PA where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Dickinson College.

Run-on, oil on paper, 12 x 9 in., 2021, $300;