Eric Anderson

Lives and works in Franklin, TN

Artist statement

"It is more significant to keep one’s painting in a state of severe experimentation than to become a quick success by means of cheap repetition." — Marsden Hartley I am quite hesitant regarding words about art. Too often language obscures — rather than illuminates — true encounter. My work, like anything that would aspire to the appellation of “art,” is a kind of embodied meaning, intended to be encountered by embodied people. Perception and presence are paramount. Much of my work has loosely aligned itself to the genre of landscape, offering as it does a very flexible latticework on which to hang my little skeins of paint. Of late, however, even this loose confinement has chafed. In newer work, often only the barest suggestion of a horizon remains to indicate any sense of place at all. As I find myself at what is often called “mid-career,” I’m far less concerned with narrative content than I once was. Instead, I’m largely content with pursuing process and lines of inquiry. Each work emerges rather like an archaeological dig run backwards, sometimes over the course of years. With each piece, and ideally with the larger thrust of the work as a whole, my aim is both foolishly grandiose and extraordinarily simple. On the one hand, I’m trying to evoke some tiny sliver of the ineffable, and on the other, I’m really just trying to stick the landing. "There is a crack, a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in." — Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Artwork