Joy. Love. Silliness. These words come to Eileen French’s mind when asked to describe her paintings.
A figurative artist at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, French’s oversized portraits feature men and women at play and in spontaneous scenes that suggest animated narratives.
French’s recent McGuffey show was called Kinship, a collection of paintings that celebrate the connections between us all, a confluence of souls.
Among her paintings are a number that celebrate her daughter, Whitney. She died as a result of domestic violence in 2017 in Charlottesville. She was thirty-three years old.
While grieving her daughter, French has caught her image forever joyful and full of high spirits in these paintings: Whits, Reveller, Technicolor Whitney, and Sparkle Motion.
“In Sparkle Motion, Whitney, having taken a photography class, left her camera aperture open and caught the movement from sparklers. It makes me feel joyous. I have it at home and look at it a lot,” says French.
“After I lost my daughter, suddenly the paintings started to be a little bit about her too,” says French. “In Embracing Her Power, I’m trying to create a goddess who would show in part love and enlightenment. I was just making up things that a goddess would have, like the blue skin and special powers. She had this look of invincibility, strength. I planned on her having power in the painting. I like to see my daughter with that power.
“It was really hard to know what to do after I lost her. How to express your emotions in art; I thought I cannot do the anger. I don’t want to do that.
“Now I’m definitely looking for people who are happy. Celebrating them. We are basically all one; we all want the same things. We want to be safe and loved. I really want the theme (of my work) to be love and kinship, human connection. I want to celebrate the human spirit, and the ability to be happy and experience joy.”
French’s inspiring paintings include one of her son, Alexander, celebrating when his band got their first 1000 followers on Instagram.
Here her daughter Lindsey, a musician in Los Angeles, takes a cool selfie for Instagram and for an album cover.
Interested in social behavior, French finds many of her dramatic and unstudied images on Instagram, Facebook, or from personal photographs. Her discoveries are of people she knows as well as strangers. “They’ve chosen an image that they want out there for everyone to see,” she says.
“I like to work from found images, usually from social media for my painting inspiration: it’s a phenomenon of our times and I find the idea of the subject having a part in the process of telling me who they are and how they want to be seen a very helpful tool in creating a work that belies a knowing or sensing of their inner self.
“I find that the random and candid aspect of social media imagery works to my advantage. I also look for the narrative quality to some of these candid scenarios and frequently find find humor to be a common aspect as well.
“I’ve curated something people think is important about themselves. I’ve managed to capture that from them without having to Investigate on my own. Occasionally I find someone I don’t know and I’ll do some research and try to get a conversation going with them.”
Such a conversation led to her Burning Man concert paintings. “I like to focus on people at events where they are letting their guard down and truly enjoying themselves like at this Burning Man festival in Nevada.”
Once she’s found a striking image, French projects it onto a blank wall until she gets the size she wants; she measures it on the wall and onto a ready canvas. She then tints her canvas her favorite shade of pink, a color that denotes love, comfort, youth. Next she draws her image in charcoal before applying paint and the charcoal often remains visible.
Her palette is rich and vivid. “I get all of the details with the charcoal and sometimes I’m just coloring in the lines with the paint. I’m just very carefully keeping my original drawing and embellishing with the paint,” she says.
French prefers the large format but also works on a smaller scale. “I guess it’s an era I grew up in that in order to make an impact, it needs to be large.
“The large paintings appeal to me in their attention demanding and impactful aspects. I find it’s really powerful to be able to place a figure life size or larger on a canvas but I also love the intimacy and immediacy of a small work.”
French’s smaller paintings include a series of gouache portraits on paper from posted selfies. “The works in gouache on paper have a different feel in that they are less labored over and show an immediacy of the hand that I enjoy.”
French painted as a child and was given art lessons at thirteen. She grew up in Louisiana as well as time spent in England and Australia. She started painting large portraits of herself and friends as an undergraduate and graduate student at Louisiana State University (LSU). She later worked as a graphic designer and had a sewing business where she designed children’s clothing.
“I kind of pushed the painting away for a while,” says French. “I married and had three kids. I just did small watercolors or sketches of the kids. At one point I thought plein air was what I should do. We’d moved to Virginia in 1998 and I went on location here and painted for a couple of years. But ultimately I didn’t feel I was doing really good quality work. I felt like it was all too hurried.”
She joined the McGuffey Art Center in 2011 and began her figurative work again. “Right away I started doing large scale paintings. I started with my kids. I found that they were posting nice pictures on social media of things they were up to; fun images. It was nice to be able to give them a portrait of themselves,” she recalls. French admires the work of portrait painters Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald and is primarily interested in contemporary art.
“I like it when people walk into my studio and feel good,” she says. ”I don’t want anything to be hard hitting. I don’t think we need that now. I think the feel in some of the work is funny, silliness. I like to have a little bit of a narrative, a story telling happening that you can make up yourself. It makes you wonder what’s happening.”
— by Elizabeth Meade Howard, Art Editor
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