Folly

Folly
2025 
Oil, graphite, and dye on sewn linen with beveled and bowed pine. 
23" x 16" x 2.5"

Eleanor Conover is an artist whose work engages with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for environmental time and space. Recent exhibitions include White Columns, New York, NY; Abattoir, Cleveland, OH; Hudson House, Hudson, NY; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; and Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY. She was the 2022 Donald J. Gordon visiting artist at Swarthmore College, and was the 2020-21 recipient of the Wellesley College Alice C. Cole ’42 fellowship. Her practice has also been supported through artist residencies including The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. With an interest in land and the environment, she has additionally engaged in the research of geologic histories in Philadelphia, PA and visual work regarding ecology in coastal places as remote as the Aleutian Islands, AK. Born in Hartford, CT in 1988, she earned an MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2018) and a BA from Harvard College (2010). She received a post-MFA teaching fellowship at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and currently lives in Topsham, ME, where she paints and is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Bowdoin College. 

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1. Life Margin Notebook A5 Plain (red binding)
2. Black Sharpie china marker.  I love the way the mark works with this paper, and it's been a way to place useful restrictions on my drawing practice.
3. Golden Fluid Matte Medium. You can use fluid matte medium to make inkjet image transfers. I have been making inkjet image transfers onto flat pieces of marble stone, which I sometimes use in my paintings, and have been thinking about how they exist on their own sculpturally as well.
4. General's graphite stick different weights/darknesses.
5. Golden fluid acrylics for paintings on paper (and I also use them for stain painting in larger paintings). Some of the colors I use the most are cobalt blue, paynes gray, nickel azo yellow….
6. Williamsburg oil paints. My favorite colors are Still de Grain, Jaune Brilliant, Graphite Gray, Terre Verte, and dianthus pink. I like how grainy some of the pigments are--they don't have a mass produced feel to them. Williamsburg paint is now made at the Golden factory in upstate NY. They crimp the ends of the tubes with a toothpaste crimper that was made in Paris in...1906 or something.
7. Jacquard Procion mx dyes.
8. ColorAid I don’t really use it, but sometimes I do. I also have a set that I made with paint in my sophomore undergrad painting class that I still refer back to.
9. Yellow Empire protractor/angle finder