what is your name?
Alfred Eaker
how would you describe what you do?
I am an expressionist painter, filmmaker, performance artist. Additionally, I write film criticism and theological essays. I am currently working on my Masters of Theological Studies in the Arts.
what are you currently working on?
A surreal, existential film titled “Stations.” A series of paintings entitled ‘Stations” and a documentary film on artist Raymond Thundersky.
what has had the greatest influence on your work?
Possibly the music of Gustav Mahler and Luigi Nono. Also, my art professor Steve Mannheimer, the writings of Thomas Merton and Flannery O’Connor, the paintings of Paul Gauguin, the films of Tod Browning, Luis Bunuel, Andrei Tarkovsky and Charlie Chaplin.
what is the greatest misconception about you or your work?
People tend to put you in a stereotypical box. “Oh, his work is abstract or surreal, etc.” The assumption is that you “cannot” do something more linear, narrative, etc. I started off as a quasi-linear artist. People tend to assume that once you have done “abstract” work, then that is all you will ever do. Journeyed art is never linear in path. Picasso certainly tightened after his Cubist phase. Too, for some reason, people who saw my first feature, “Jesus and her Gospel of Yes” that i was some kind of atheist. Far from it. The film itself echoes and expresses my own Zen Catholicism. Atheism, for me, tends as much towards totalitarianism as fundamentalism does.
what do you see as the main strengths and weaknesses of the medium you work in?
In painting I work exclusively in oils and would have it no other way. It is a vibrant, organic medium, but it is a solitary form of expression and work process. Film is reliant on collaboration, which is simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating.
how has technology impacted upon the work you do?
In painting, absolutely none! Film, of course, is reliant on technology, but it is not that I am hands on with the technology. I am still primarily a concept artists and delegate to those who have the technological skills because I am not in the slightest bit interested in the aesthetics of filmmaking.
what’s the greatest piece of advice you would like to pass on?
Art is a vocation. Anything less is not art.
where can we find you online?
http://www.illuminationgallery.net/guests/eaker/eaker.html
what are you reading at the moment?
“Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton.”
what are you listening to at the moment?
Julie London.
anything else we should know?
N/A