About the Artist 2014
My name is Eric Henshall and my cat is Swivel.
I am a Melbourne-based artist.
I have been painting full-time since 2002, though of course I've been painting and making arty-things since I was a babe in swaddling-clothes.
I have been, on the side lines, working on an old-fashioned point-and-click adventure game for the PC over the past three years (egads!). The first part is very, very nearly finished. It has been a steep learning curve as it has involved - besides all the painting and animating - learning the rudiments of coding, but once finished one will be able to walk around animated versions of my paintings.
I make my own clothes, as I have a penchant for waistcoats and very high waitlines.
I've never really grown out of my nerdy youth and more often than I should really confess, I can be found throwing handfuls of strangely shaped dice around and pretending to slay dragons.
I still like to dance and I have not spun anybody off a balcony in quite a few years now.
Painting is fun!
ERIC HENSHALL, late (very late) 2014.
What I see as willfully obtuse art and an unhealthy focus upon theory and pure novelty, had left me convinced that what we do is of immeasurably lesser socio-cultural value than music, literature, poetry, film, comics or video games. That basically, if we do anything of value, it can be better done in some other form. Then...
... During a meandering drive through the Mississippi Delta with my father, I was starved of visual art. After some time we hit upon New Orleans and its crop of galleries. I had not realized how much I missed paintings. The sheer riot of colour was air-conditioning in mid-summer. And I realized that visual art can do something no other form can - it can thrill us in a gentle and undemanding way that is all its own. It exists forever in its own moment, not needing a performer, not needing an audience, not needing a projector. It exists permanently and without interruption, waiting for the lucky chance that the right people will see it at the right time. And then it pounces. It...
... Struck me that no other form could do this. All other art exists in time (at least ‘more fully' in time), lasts only so long as it is played, performed, projected. Even books have endings. And other forms require some investment as one wants to see the film from the start, hear the song from the start. Visual art doesn't demand this. It is self-contained. ... It's just a thought - it's helpful for me.