Eva Yates is the South London artist who simply will not sit still. The energy, negative and positive, creates a tension in her art you just can’t prise your eyes away from.
Frenetic activity is central to Eva Yates’s work. She’s never settled. The battle between two profound urges in an artist – to hone one’s craft or to innovate and challenge oneself – is typical of someone whose mind has always refused to stay in one place.
Eva admits there’s a dark tension to her paintings that reflect the unease that rarely leaves her. Severe anxiety and mental entropy followed a taxing time at university (Eva partied on borrowed time during her stretch at Leeds College of Art, indulging with abandon), but all this nervous energy has resulted in an insatiable drive to depict ideas, rather than tarry too much over form. Eva is an explorer and experimenter.
ArrayNarcissus, 2021
‘My first hallucinations were bad, so bad,’ Eva tells me, ‘It was always there, in the corner of my eye. I’d catch my parents talking about me and hear the whispers, and no matter what people tell you, you can’t believe them. There were times where I’d see a face or a tree, and that’s without drugs, maybe after a coffee. Even though most of my work might look serene, like the rest of us I’m always fighting a form of anxiety. That’s a key undertone in these paintings: even though life might appear ‘just beautiful’, and things might look nice and sweet from the outside, you never know what’s going on behind the scenes’.
Born and raised in Southeast London, Eva credits her stable family life as an indispensable support, a home set-up that re-formed during lockdown when she and her two sisters found themselves all living back with mum and dad.
Untitled, 2021
But, artistically, she’s still not ‘Eva Yates, Artist.’ She isn’t fully formed and ‘branded’ as a painter, nor does she declare herself as such, which is refreshing to hear, especially when creatives are so pressured today to cater to online audiences rather than follow their own intuition. ‘My paintings are a bit ADHD,’ Eva admits, ‘I’m constantly thinking ‘ooh, let’s follow this idea!’ or ‘yes! Let’s explore that!’ so what I’m beginning to focus on is creating a whole series that contains the same ideas and the same palettes.’
This might seem like a sensible way for some artists to realise their inspiration onto canvas, but for Eva it can prove baneful. She paints relatively slowly, and whilst this produces detailed, intrinsic results, her pinball machine brain can grow frustrated as new idea after new idea bombards her. Because she’s still learning, towards the end of each painting, she’s already itching to start a new one – all part of her autodidact education she was cruelly denied in a formal capacity elsewhere.
‘It’s the reason I went to New York, to learn to paint, but it was cut short because of Covid. My mum rang me and said, ‘Oh my God, you have asthma, you need to come home!’ and so I only got a couple of years of face-to-face tuition, the rest was completed over Zoom.
‘I’d tried to convey what I had learnt, and was trying to learn, in my painting of Ophelia [top of page]. It’s a very classical realist, representational painting. I wanted to show how the old can still be seen through our new world’s prism. I did the same with Narcissus, painting my friend looking at his own reflection in a hot tub. After that I wanted to move towards my own themes, instead of copying compositions from one of the greats.’
Midsummer Supper Party, 2021
These stem from whatever she’s fixated on at the time, from a smaller-scale setting of a laden dinner table with the added tension of spilt wine, to a Hieronymous Bosch hellscape of judgement day filled with demons and saved souls. But staying focused is the issue. Not a problem, but definitely a defining trait of Eva the Painter.
It’s entirely possible that Eva suffers from some form of artistic Seasonal Affective Disorder. When she’s painting a scene inspired by a climate and culture specific to a time in the year, her energy to complete it will wane as one season moves into the next, a trait indicative again of her restlessness, but one underpinned here with strong reasoning. ‘I’d begun painting a bird’s-eye view of an al fresco dinner but when winter came, I stopped to focus on more wintery paintings, which I then carry on the next summer.’
The propulsion to always be bettering and challenging herself is clearly a strategy that suits Eva, who has no interest in developing a specialism just yet. ‘It’s all slowly coming together,’ she affirms, ‘I’d love to be rich and famous now but really, I’m in no rush. The whole problem with today’s art is that it’s too fast-paced. You’re getting shown things on your phone because it might be relevant or consistent with your personalised algorithm on Instagram or Pinterest, but we as artists need to work with that. People are expected to look at a picture online for about five seconds or less, a painting that might have taken me three months to complete, but that’s just the way things are now.
‘But, conversely, I’d rather people were looking at my work and moving on than never seeing it, because there’s always the chance they might see it again in the future and think, ‘Oh there’s that painting that touched me somewhat when I looked at it for three seconds a year ago’.
It’s amusing to consider that that same person Eva mentions may well revisit her online profile and spot a completely different artist to the one they saw previously. There are many moulds of painters in today’s art world, all for whom introspection is a prerequisite, but what’s not necessary, which Eva brings to every blank canvas, is adventure.
- You can follow Eva on Instagram here
