About

Eveline is a Dutch-born artist who grew up in rural Western Australia. The farm and surrounding forest were her range, while at home the walls were adorned with mysterious Dutch oil paintings by her great, great Grandfather. 

These two major impressions influence her work, which intertwines a love of nature and the luminous qualities of oil paint, in work that is woven with themes of empathy, transformation and human-animal relationships.

Hold Close the Things That are Dear to You

By Gregory Pryor

When dogs respond to our moods, to our pleasure and fears, when they anticipate our intentions, or wait excitedly to see whether we will take them for a walk, they do not assume that we are sensate beings with intentions. I imagine that it was the same for us in our primitive state. Out of such unhesitating interactions, between ourselves, and between us and animals, there developed – not beliefs, assumptions and conjectures about the mind – but our very concepts of thought, feeling, intention, belief, doubt and so on.1

I’ve arrived in Eveline Ruys’s empty studio hoping to talk to her about her work. There is no- one around, but even so, the work is very much alive and talkative. There is a palpable presence amongst this vast body of intimate little paintings, with the colors and forms swirling around the space, each work resonating with the others in a harmony that has been gracefully articulated throughout.

My eye shifts to the studio work table, where two small wooden palettes shine with a well-polished surface that is the result of a daily routine working with oil paints. They are beautifully used objects. The fact that one is rectangular and the other ovular only adds to their role in the engine room of Eveline Ruys’s labors. These contrasting geometric shapes work together to make art – one architectural and structural and the other organic (often called a ‘kidney’ palette) and lyrical. These palettes also hold the memory of every thought and every action that has gone into the paintings.

The respect and care that Ruys demonstrates towards her tools (her portfolio of brushes are also lovingly washed after every studio session) is clearly evident in the manner she constructs these paintings. Like the contrasting palettes that combine in the pursuit of a common goal, these paintings often depict a woman in a space that is shared with a contrasting object or animal. It may be the supporting, structural chair or sofa that the woman reclines in or even the walls and floor of the interior itself. Centrally however, the other presence is a domestic or farmyard animal such as a dog or horse.

Given the fact that Ruys grew up on a farm in the South West of Western Australia, this affinity with animals is likely to be an enduring and personal one, but her works are also dialogues with art history. Depictions of domesticated animals have attracted artists across time and cultures for hundreds of years, whether it be Giuseppe Castiglione’s paintings of the Qianlong Emperor’s dogs, Andrea Mantegna’s dogs painted on the walls of the Palazzo del Te in Mantova or the fluffy little terrier in the foreground of Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding. This interest in the history of art is clearly evident in Ruys’ studio, where reference images and studies drawn from historical sources proliferate.

These are not just objective and representational contributions to the interior and figurative genres of painting, but also lean towards the imaginary, the allegorical or a gently intuited symbolism. In this way, the transformative stories of Ovid and their persistence through the canon of western painting are never very far away in this work. At times, the work wants to fly off into this imagined space completely, but critically informed restraint permeates many of the outcomes presented here. The elegant settings and compositions constantly return to a site of comfort and familiarity. There is even something reminiscent of Lucien Freud’s familiar settings here; a known and comfortable space that is constantly activated and altered through the subjects that migrate through it. Each painting session undertaken also contributes the painter’s particular inflections or emotional and intellectual intent into the space on the easel.

This defined real and painterly space then, acts as a sanctuary, a safe space that not only allows, but actively facilitates dreaming. This work is a beautiful depiction of being in a very comfortable, private and even meditative space, surrounded by things known and loved. It is not a space of interruptions or uncertainty, but of endless time, where thoughts may begin as a simple drop of water, but are allowed to merge into the deepest pools of reverie.

The focus and distillation of this work is even more remarkable (or may have been aided by), given the fact that it has emerged during one of the world’s most interrupted, tense, and uncertain times in recent memory – the COVID 19 pandemic.

Despite the fact that all classes were shifted online during the initial lockdown at ECU and the campus was virtually deserted, Eveline continued to come in to work. Her dedication to this project made it clear to me how robust an art practice is. It has been terrible to see how many arts and cultural practitioners have been affected by these times, but easel painting like this occurs in a perpetual state of social distancing. In this way, painting is a very simple and low impact activity that often produces high impact results. With personal movement and travel significantly curtailed globally, the movement happening in these works continued unabated.

These works have also been painted in a studio devoid of natural light which may seem surprising to some viewers, given their light-infused and transparent qualities. The light that Ruys imbues these works with is an internal, painterly light, borne through the painters craft:

Paint on canvas, with all its tactile variations between staining and impasto and the varieties of underpainting and glazes, responds to light in a fundamentally different way than the more purely two-dimensional surface of a photograph. And this response is itself constantly in flux, as the surrounding conditions of light continue to change. The play between illusionistic depth created through composition and another depth created through the physical presence of the paint itself remains a crucial area in which painting retains an autonomy still unchallenged by other media.2

This constantly shifting attribute at the heart of the process of painting is
what I felt when I walked into the space and it often comes about through the determined efforts of the painter to translate the inchoate and fugitive qualities of paint into something that is definable, or something that we can respond
to and even empathise with. This duality is also something Raymond Gaita eloquently observed in his acutely observed meditations on his dog Gypsy:

Sometimes when I see her on the bedroom or kitchen rug or note the ease with which she wanders through the house, I experience the type of perceptual flux that occurs when I see now one side and then the other of an ambiguous drawing. 3

The ambiguity that Gaita observes here is based on the fact that his dog has an essentially ‘wild’ side that is capable of attacking the neighbour’s cat or a threatening stranger, but is difficult to comprehend when seeing her so relaxed and comfortable in a domestic setting.

The animals in Ruys’s paintings create a similar ambiguity. They are calm and often interact seamlessly in their surroundings or with the figures, but these are not pretty, cosmetic renderings – the gestural, quality of the paint is like a secret language that alerts us to the mysterious, untamed otherworld of human-animal relationships.

Endnotes

1. Gaita, R. (2002). The philosopher’s dog. Melbourne, Australia: The text publishing.

2. Ferguson, R. (2004).The undiscovered country. Los Angeles: Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

3. Gaita, R. (2002). The philosopher’s dog. Melbourne, Australia: The text publishing.