Eda Easton
Copyright® of the entire site by Easton Studio, Storrs, CT 06268. No part of this site may be reproduced without written permission of the artist.
A few Notes About Eda Easton and her Work
Eda Easton was born in Munich, Germany, in 1937. In the late 1920s, her father Robert, who had served in the German army in WWI and spent considerable time as a French prisoner of war, had visited America in his professional capacity as engineer, studying mass production of automobiles in Detroit. In Chicago, he met Elsa and fell in love with her. He returned to Germany and she followed. They married in Hamburg as soon as Elsa got off the boat in 1929. The situation in Germany very quickly became intolerable, but many obligations still kept the family in Munich. They finally emigrated to America in the Fall of 1938. The immigrant family first lived in Chicago and after a few years moved to Long Beach, California, where Robert started a new factory of his own.
Schooling in Long Beach was miserable for Eda. Having an older brother, she had already learned the skills other students in her classes found difficult to acquire. To her great joy, she was accepted at age sixteen to the University of Chicago for what she describes as her intellectually most formative experience. After obtaining a B.A. there, she started her career as an artist at age twenty at the Art Students League in New York. A fellowship by the Bavarian Government allowed her to enter graduate studies at the Art Academy (Akademie der Bildenden Künste) of Munich, where she was trained in the traditional techniques and modes of sculptural expression.
In 1963, the same year that she was awarded a M.F.A., she married her favorite male model, a research scientist whose main field was chemistry. His career led the couple to California in 1967, first to Berkeley, and a year later to San Jose. They lived in Los Gatos and in 1971 moved to a new place in nearby Monte Sereno. During the years in California, she freed herself from the classical training of the Academy and developed her skills in a variety of media: bronze and aluminum casting, a new technique to build up in cement, and the mastery of welding. Works on paper and canvas went parallel with these developments. Many of her sculpture projects first were visualized as drawings.
For many years, her studio doubled as a private art school with evening and weekend classes for students whose ages ranged from 12 to 60 years. Life drawing and figurative sculpture were the main subjects of these courses.
During the California years (1967-1982), several extended stays in Europe expanded her scope of techniques. A one-year residency in the French science and art center of Grenoble may have deprived her of sculpting by being far from her own studio, but it enforced her strengths in painting and drawing and made her discover stone lithography for herself.
Exploring and mastering other media for her purposes reached an extreme in the creation of her polyester resin sculptures [look at polyester resin sculptures].
A career change of her husband required moving from California to Connecticut in 1982. This was a break for her in many ways. A new studio was built, and with it new orientations evolved. There seems to be a distinction in her artistic expression in the works from the years before 1982 [look at some of them] and a post-1982 focus.
Some of the first post-1982 works were large-scale outdoor cement pieces [go there], some of them motivated by a trip to Morocco in 1983. Large veiled figures traveling on primitive vehicles give a feeling of a then innocent Muslim world – a by now rather eerie juxtaposition to the present post-9/11 attitudes.
The small models of the large cement pieces were cast in bronze before the big pieces were executed. The working with and finishing of bronze pieces [go to Bronzes] gradually made this her dominant medium, although the casting expenses led her, for the time being, to restrict herself to small and medium sizes.
In the 1980s, painting also evolved as major medium for Eda Easton. She had resisted this for years because she felt herself dedicated to three-dimensional work and also because she apparently had never realized her strengths in expressing herself in color. The two-dimensional paintings demonstrated her strength in this medium, but soon thereafter the third dimension manifested itself again in her three-dimensional paintings.
In the 1990’s, two- and three-dimensional work merged in her figurative work using wood and acrylic media. In these pieces, sculpture and painting are forming a previously not seen union.
Travels and extended stays around the globe as an enlightening diversion have been important all along. In 1988-89, she spent six months in Würzburg, Germany, and used this time for excursions throughout Europe. This was followed by four month in Grenoble. Visits in 1995-96 to the South Pacific, to Australia and New Zealand, were combined with a return to the US via Indonesia, Thailand and five European countries. A trip in 2002 to South Africa and Namibia and Australia, with a return via Manila and Palau, kept her immersed in many new and unforeseen impressions.
The most recent visit to Tasmania offered the opportunity to work at a girl’s school in Hobart as artist in residence. The school wanted a sculpture at a specific spot, which presented a view over the Derwent River. She decided that an obelisk would be most appropriate because it would, in its construction, give the girls an opportunity to participate, and, in its shape and placement, would not interfere with but rather enhance the local environment. The creation of the 4 m (13 ft) high Hobart Obelisk turned out to be a great project for students, faculty and the artist and her much beloved assistants.
Her present focus again is on bronze sculptures. Due to the political climate in the world, her sculptures are more inward looking and concern personal relationships. These pieces are directly sculpted in wax and the casts are made from the wax originals as unique bronzes.
