In Conversation with Eleanor Louise Butt

Her recent inclusion in The Intelligence of Painting at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, alongside both living and historical painters, confirmed what those who follow Australian painting had long suspected: Eleanor is operating at a rare frequency. Now, with a new exhibition, Unfolding Fields, opening at COMA in Sydney this month, and a just-submitted master's by research at Monash, the work has reached a new point of crystallisation. She sat down to speak with writer Tiffany Jade over video call from her studio, a space she built after a residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall taught her that a bigger pond demands a bigger fish.

Open Journal (OJ): Your paintings often begin with no fixed destination in mind. Can you describe what it actually feels like to start a new work, what you're reaching for, and what you're trying to let go of?

Eleanor Louise Butt (ELB): "I sometimes come to the canvas with an underlying feeling of what I want to get from the work I'm about to start making," Eleanor says. "It begins as quite a sensory sort of process of making marks, and then responding to those marks with new ones." She pauses. "It's like you're watching an idea forming in front of you rather than in your mind.”

The process, she explains, feeds and propels itself. A sense of recognition in a colour or a form rather than the overt recognition of an object in the world outside painting. Something internal, almost somatic, draws the work down a particular pathway. When it ends is equally instinctual. She describes starting a large canvas expecting weeks of sustained effort, only to finish it in a day or a few hours. “I think, oh, I wasn't expecting that. It's really through being able to recognise when a work is doing something, where you wanted to allow it to remain."

What is required, she says, is relinquishing control. Trusting the process. Trusting yourself to recognise when something needs to stay where it has arrived. "If I try to pre-plan a work too heavily, it can resolve with a kind of deadness. It comes out flat, and not that interesting to me because I haven't had to follow the work through on its journey from inception to resolution." She has written about paintings as sites of discovery. "If you've already discovered what you're trying to make, it kind of circumvents that purpose."

"It's like you're watching an idea forming in front of you rather than in your mind."

OJ: The titles of your works — All That Which Sings, I'd Make a Soft Green Pillow for Your Head, Slippages and Tensions — are beautifully poetic. How do titles arrive for you, and what do you want them to do for the viewer?

ELB: "I don't want them to overtake the work," she says immediately. "The paintings themselves are a complete language." Eleanor keeps titles deliberately oblique, not wanting them to prescribe a reading or an experience. The work must remain open.

Some titles are drawn from poetry or lines from songs she has listened to while painting. But the titles for Unfolding Fields came from a different place entirely: two years of exegesis writing for a Master of Fine Art (research), submitted just weeks before we spoke. “A lot of the deep thinking I've done has gone into the current titles, and it felt really good to draw from my own writing. It made them feel true to the work in a new way." She titles at the very end of her practice, never while making. She selects the works for a show, then sits with them.

She admits that if she could have her way, she would probably call them all Untitled. "Just to let that experience of viewing be what it will, subjectively." And yet she concedes that the titles do open the works up. They offer a doorway. "Something about my paintings and my own practice is that it's really about entering into the painting. When you're painting, you kind of become a part of it. And I want that to remain available for the viewer as well."

OJ: Your studio is in the Dandenong Ranges, surrounded by bush. Does your environment seep into your work, consciously or otherwise?

ELB: "We do feel like we are very surrounded by the natural world," she says of her home in Kallista, where the garden backs down to a creek, forested hillside rising beyond. Her studio sits amongst that garden. What enters the work is not direct depiction; she is careful to note, "but they do have a sense of atmosphere about them." She sees the influence of light shifting through the trees, the glowing gold lichens on dark eucalypt trunks. "I am seeing a correlation between my current body of work and things I've observed in the natural world, such as colours, forms and relationships.”

It enters by osmosis as often as by intention. She might look out of her studio doors at a wall of dense green, stand before a blank canvas, and think: I want to experience a density of colour with my body really close to it in this painting. Or she might return from a walk having encountered a golden lichen on a particular tree and find herself bringing that colour back into a painting that had been waiting.

There is also an older geography at work: the garden she grew up in, designed by Edna Walling in the 1930s. When her family bought the property, Delara, in the mid-1980s, it was overgrown. No one knew who had designed it. Decades of weeding slowly revealed winding pathways, stone steps, terraced areas, "the most incredible garden." This process of revelation became a lens for thinking about painting. "You can think of a painting as a space you can traverse," she says, "where things can be revealed through the removal or application of colour." The experience of being immersed in that garden, ”really immersed, with these trees that change and shift colour, giant poplars with wisteria winding all the way to the top, massive advanced camellias and rhododendrons down to tiny little bulbs and mosses,” carries a sensation analogous to what happens when you are deep inside the making of a painting. "It's not that the paintings are of these spaces. But there's that comparative sensation,of being within a living, created field."

OJ: You work across painting, drawing, and bronze sculpture, often concurrently. What does each medium give you that the others can't?

The bronzes, she says, gave her the feeling of pulling the work into existence. "When you're making a bronze, you can make it in wax first. You have all this softened, liquid, semi-firm wax, and you mould what you're making directly with your hand. So you get this very tactile sense of scratching and building, and it allows you to retain things like fingerprints, delicate scratch marks, that also have a weight to them." It allowed her to access those feelings she described in relation to painting even more directly, of being really within, really connected to the material.

Drawing is similar in that it’s "super immediate." Pencil and charcoal. That immediacy is a quality she works hard to retain in her paintings as well, wanting them to look as if the artist has just stepped away. "Like maybe they could be returned to or not. But I want them to retain this real sense of aliveness."

OJ: You were the first female Australian artist to hold a residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall, UK, a place with a remarkable historyof painting. What did that experience change, if anything?

ELB: "It was such an impactful experience," she says simply. The journey itself mattered. The long train ride from London down to Cornwall, through fields and past an old castle and then onto the coast, the train running right along the edge of the ocean before Cornwall announced itself. "I felt like the trees got closer to the train line, Cornish flags started appearing, and everything became that little bit wilder. It really did feel like a whole different place.”

The studio she was allocated had formerly been Ben Nicholson's studio, then Patrick Heron's. For a time, Francis Bacon had worked next door. The Sloop Inn, the town pub dating to the 1600s, held stories: Bob Dylan playing guitar in a corner, brawls, sailors, and smugglers. “You're just steeped in art history in this tiny fishing village on the coast," she says. "It's incredible.”

But the studio itself was something else. Enormous. Skylit. A potbelly stove in the corner. "When I first walked into it, I remember thinking: this feels like a real test. I want to push myself to do it." She did. Between painting sessions, she would buy a Cornish pasty, walk the clifftops along the Atlantic, vertical hail, neon yellow gorse among dark umber bracken, waves so powerful they reverberated through her whole body as they bruised the cliffs below. "I felt so inspired by that sensation. I questioned: how can I bring this into my practice?" That question, she says, "birthed a whole new body of work for me, and a new way of working, trying to work out, not so much logically but physically, how to access a feeling like that through art making.”

She came home with a body of work, showed it in Melbourne, and made a close friend in her neighbour artist Felicity Mara, whose husband, writer Michael Bird, wrote the catalogue essay. And she built a bigger studio. "It really showed me: if you give yourself more space and more time, what you can be capable of. If you make your pond bigger, you can grow into it.”

OJ: Your work was recently included in The Intelligence of Painting at the MCA alongside some significant names. What does it mean to you to be in conversation with other painters, both living and historical?

ELB: "That show was such a true honour to be included in," she says. “It’s incredibly meaningful to be recognised alongside some of my favourite artists." There is an honesty to how she describes the effect: "I feel like maybe I shouldn't say 'confidence boost,’but the recognition does help you to feel like what you're doing is worth pursuing.”

The MCA also commissioned her to deliver a talk on her own practice, offering a chance to develop language around the works in the show and her practice more broadly. And then they asked her to give a talk on the work of Julie Mehretu, who was showing at the MCA concurrently. "That was a really interesting thing to undertake," she says, the opportunity to trace connections, to place her own thinking alongside another painter's, to speak not just of her work but of painting's intelligence more broadly. That, too, felt like a form of conversation.

You can find out more about Eleanor Louise Butt on her website or Instagram. Her current exhibition is at COMA Sydney - find out more here. Interview by Tiffany Jade. Photography by Hamish McIntosh.