Tristan Eaton Makes Walls Feel Too Small for the Art

Hi-Fructose has a great piece on Tristan Eaton and the path that led him from graffiti, illustration and commercial design into the enormous murals and paintings he is known for today.

I absolutely love his work. The scale is the first thing that grabs me, but it is what happens inside these enormous pieces that makes me want to keep looking. Eaton builds figures out of layers of realistic portraiture, cartoons, typography, patterns, advertising, comics and fragments of popular culture. From across the street you see a face or a figure. As you get closer, the image breaks apart into dozens of smaller images and ideas.

There is an incredible amount happening in these murals without them feeling like a mess. That might be the part I find most impressive. He can put completely different visual styles beside each other, sometimes inside the same silhouette, and somehow they become one coherent piece. A realistic eye might sit beside a cartoon character, an old advertisement, a geometric pattern and a few words of type. Each piece could almost be pulled apart into a collection of smaller paintings, but from a distance everything snaps back together.

Eaton describes his work as a kind of puzzle, finding imagery that creates emotion and harmony when it is placed together. That makes sense when you look at it. He likes painting realistically, but he also likes cartoons, patterns and typography, and these large works give him somewhere to use all of those visual languages at once rather than choosing between them.

I think that freedom is part of what makes the murals feel so alive.

His career makes the combination feel natural too. Eaton started making art professionally as a teenager in Detroit, tagging trains and designing rave posters. He moved through illustration, toy design, advertising, gallery work and street art, and co-designed the original Dunny for Kidrobot. For years he also ran a successful commercial design studio while continuing to make his own work.

All of those different lives seem to have accumulated rather than replacing one another. The graphic instincts from advertising are still there. So is the graffiti. So are comics, traditional painting, design and the visual noise of popular culture. Instead of cleaning those influences away when he moved further into fine art, he found a way to put all of them on the same wall.

And some of those walls are enormous.

Eaton has painted multi-story buildings around the world, creating pieces where the architecture becomes part of how the artwork is experienced. I love art at that scale because you cannot really encounter it the same way you encounter something hanging inside a gallery. A mural becomes part of the neighborhood around it. People walk beneath it on their way to work, see it from their cars, use it as a landmark and live with it every day.

There is something amazing about giving that much visual attention to a surface that might otherwise just be a blank side of a building.

A huge piece of public art can completely change how a place feels. It can turn an ordinary wall into something people remember about a city. You do not need to know anything about contemporary art, buy a ticket or deliberately go looking for it. You can simply turn a corner and suddenly there is a five-story painting in front of you.

I think that accessibility is one of the things I love most about murals and large public art. The artist gets to make something ambitious, but the audience includes everyone who happens to pass by. Someone might spend twenty minutes studying it while another person sees it for five seconds through a car window. Both get to have some relationship with the work.

Eaton's murals seem especially well suited to that experience because they reward both distances. From far away there is an immediate image with enough contrast and structure to hold an entire building. Up close there is almost too much to see. You start noticing pieces buried inside other pieces, little bits of text and imagery that disappear completely when you step back.

It reminds me that scale in art does not have to mean simply making a normal painting bigger. The really good large pieces take advantage of having all that space. They give you something that could not have had the same effect on a small canvas.

There is also something I appreciate about Eaton refusing to separate all the different kinds of art he enjoys making. There is a tendency to put creative work into categories and decide that illustration belongs over here, commercial design belongs somewhere else, graffiti belongs outside, and fine art belongs in a gallery. Eaton's work seems largely uninterested in those boundaries.

Good.

Some of the most interesting work happens when those categories collide.

I have been paying more attention lately to artists working at this kind of scale, and every time I find someone like Eaton I end up wanting to see the work in person. Photographs can show you the composition and detail, but they cannot really communicate what it feels like to stand beneath something several stories tall that another person covered with an idea.

There is an audacity to making art that large that I really admire. You are not quietly asking someone to notice it. You are taking an entire wall and making something impossible to ignore.

The world needs more walls like that.

Read Nastia Voynovskaya's piece on Tristan Eaton at Hi-Fructose.

Explore more of Tristan Eaton's work.