Artwork of the Week!

Artwork of the Week!
Week 12:

Eleanor Bond (born 1948)
Another Fallen Convertible
1980
Lithograph

After pursuing studies in interior design, English and comparative religion, Eleanor Bond completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Manitoba with a major in printmaking. Like her contemporary Wanda Koop, Bond is well-travelled and this has affected her art. Another Fallen Convertible is from a group of lithographs she produced shortly after she had spent time in places as disparate as Texas, India and the Columbian Icefields of the Canadian Rockies. Her prints of this period show small vehicles with no one behind the wheel amid treacherous mountain landscapes. Bond commented on this early series to Robert Enright:

“I think often when you’ve been traveling and you come back there’s a sense that nothing has changed. So this work was about not becoming complacent, about being on the road and taking chances. It was fairly metaphorical, not in a physical sense but in an intellectual and spiritual sense.” (Enright, “The Comfort of Edges”, 12)

From the mid-1980s until the present day, Bond has built her reputation as a painter of large urban landscapes that hover between utopian/hopeful and dystopian/hopeless visions of the future. Like Another Fallen Convertible, Bond’s paintings are depopulated but they show plentiful evidence of the human environment, thereby enabling individuals to project themselves into her scenes. And while the perspective Bond employed in Another Fallen Convertible seems disconcerting, the artist has become known for engaging viewers with even more dizzying aerial views.