The Waterloo Button Factory offers some relief for Kitchener-Waterloo’s snowy winter scenery this January with its colourful new exhibition Landscapes: Abstracted and Minimalized.
Available for viewing from Jan. 4—28, the Button Factory opened its doors this past Friday for the exhibit’s reception.
The intimate venue was accompanied by a cellist and a small but attentive crowd for the acrylic landscape paintings of Sue Ellen Eatrides.
“I call it Landscapes: Minimalized and Abstracted… Some of what you see here is closer to traditional, and others are more towards the abstract, or minimal where they’re just colour and a horizon,” explains Eatrides, who expressed excitement regarding her first solo exhibition.
All across the gallery, Sue Ellen’s 27 paintings are displayed. Hanging along the walls, the painted canvases illustrate landscapes of various sizes and concepts.
While some very clearly depict trees, hills and mountaintops, other paintings are simply comprised of swirls and lines of various colours with no definable shape.
Eatrides told The Cord, “I try to exaggerate the colour, I try to exaggerate the shape…. It was, for me, an exercise in artistic freedom.”
“I used to paint a lot of realistic portraits… it’s not my main focus any more, now I paint with a lot of landscapes. I just needed to, for my own growth, move off into something a little more free.”
Eatrides, who enjoys hiking, often discovers stimulation for her own colourful creations based on of natural encounters.
“I like to hike a lot and in England and Germany when you hike you’re often walking through the farm areas,” she shared.
While Eatrides will only confess to joking that her favourite painting is always one that she finishes last, it is her most detailed paintings, such as her eye-catching red poppies and sunny farm fields that appear to be lingered around longest by viewers.
In the past, Eatrides has participated in group exhibitions as a member of the Button Factory and the Kitchener-Waterloo Society of Artists. In the future, she hopes to experiment with a more impressionistic style.
The Button Factory’s next exhibition, Mark Walton’s “SHIFT” available for viewing Feb. 1 – Mar. 29.
