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Craig Easton made his Brisbane debut at Ryan Renshaw Gallery and confirmed his reputation as one of Melbourne’s better abstract painters. He presented refined, meticulous and highly aesthetic elaborations of the genre in a mix of large-scale abstract paintings, smaller shelf pieces, and wooden containers.
Easton exists in a kind of twilight zone for he is a traditionalist who remains open to recent developments. His commitment to technical expertise and the exploration of abstraction’s formal questions is somewhat out of kilter with some of today’s painters who are post-production conceptualists. The latter tend to treat painting styles as freewheeling options that are adapted and combined to produce works that do not have a consistent look, style, material, subject, or theme. Yet Easton shares the new generations’ desire to exploit the worlds of design, sculpture and architecture to expand painting’s range of operations. Like Tomma Abts, Karen Kilimnik and others, he also focuses on ‘how’ to make do with painting’s legacy rather than getting hung up on pondering the ontology of the medium.
Easton is a methodical and fastidious painter who explores new territory in the same assiduous manner as he approaches everything else. Cases in point were the large-scale works Finish (2007) and Suddenly (2007). Finish contained a white field and an upper portion of black rectangles, and from it dripped lines of paint. The drip is readily associated with the artist’s unique brush mark and has expressionistic connotations, but this untidiness is anathema to Easton’s sensibilities. By depicting these drips in a highly stylised manner they turned into motifs, and were then readily incorporated into his decorative ensembles.
Easton was more adventurous in After (2007) where he set up