Eva!
Night Ride. Eva Lake. 2006. 36 x 36″ at Augen Gallery
“A certain amount of combustion is not only possible, but maybe necessary.” —Eva Lake
Celebrate the opening of artist Eva Lake’s solo show “Take Off, Recent Paintings at Augen Gallery (817 SW 2nd) at the First Thursday reception, August 3, 2006 from 5:30-8:30 PM. Lake recently had work in our beloved Portland Modern and now takes over a room at Augen with her visually oscillating paintings.
Critical to the arts in Portland, Lake is gallery director of the Chambers Gallery, a fascinating writer and diarist, great interviewer (on her ArtStar radio show on KPSU), former owner of Lovelake Gallery, and the list goes on.
For all of this whirl of activity that is Eva Lake, there is a calm discipline in her paintings that vibrate as she does, but in strictly regulated form. Everyone always likes to point out that her grids, her straight lines, are drawn freehand, which is an interesting aside, but the real story here is the rigor of her practice. However challenging the paintings are with their charged juxtapositions of color forcing the gaze into search mode, offering no pat resting place, suggesting infinity, we can’t get away from thinking about the fierceness and discipline it takes to repeatedly attack using this visual strategy of the grid (even as it is elongated to very new proportions this time out without losing its Lake-ness). We also deeply appreciate her isolation of one aspect of picture making, color, for almost scientific study in her selections and positioning of oppositional colors that make the canvas surface thrum.
Go see, go see. Then we’ll talk.
Correction: We had previously misidentified Lake as an “Oregon Biennial artist.” Was that wishful thinking on the part of the writer? ultra regrets the error.
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