Visual art review from Winston-Salem Journal, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001:

ART THAT MATTERS: SCOTT EAGLE STRIVES TO ADDRESS MAJOR LIFE

ISSUES IN DIVERSE WORKS AT HIGH POINT'S THEATRE ART GALLERIES

by Tom Patterson / Special to the Journal

HIGH POINT--The art that Winston-Salem native Scott Eagle has been making for

more than a decade has been guided by his desire to create imagery that is

both contemporary and spiritually inspirational.

Works such as those on view through Oct. 27 in "Theology," his solo

exhibition at the Theatre Art Galleries, were generated by a rigorous, ongoing

process of self-inquiry and intuitive experimentation that he described in a

recent interview from his home in Greenville, where he is an assistant professor of

painting and drawing at East Carolina University.

"I was begining to very directly confront the idea of death, and to think

about what kind of purpose there is behind things, and about how I could make

my life meaningful," he said. "I began to ask myself what kind of images in

modern society really inspire me in a deeply spiritual way, and I couldn't

think of many. So I asked myself, 'How can I create images that will speak of

something bigger than everyday life but that will also connect me to my fellow

human beings as well as to the future and the past?'"

The 33 of Eagle's paintings, drawings and mixed-media pieces that make up

his High Point show exemplify his response to that self-questioning. Although

stylistically varied, they're rich in detailed imagery derived from

art-historical sources, his own dreams and a variety of mystical and mythological

traditions, including those of ancient Greece, Christianity, Buddhism and American

Indian shamanism.

Born in Winston-Salem in 1963, Eagle lived here for much of his childhood

and throughout his adolescence, graduating from Reynolds High School. Eagle's

twin enthusiasms during his school years were art and diving. A state diving

champion during his years at Reynolds, he augmented the four-year academic art

scholarship he was awarded to attend East Carolina University with a diving

scholarship.

He had targeted ECU for his higher education because of its art

department's reputation as the best in the state, and because the school was also

reputed to have a good swimming and diving team. Concentrating on the art of

illustration, he earned a bachelor's degree in communication arts there in 1986.

Later that year he moved to New York, where he envisioned himself becoming "a

world-famous illustrator."

That didn't happen, although he was able to earn enough money doing

freelance illustration to support himself in a Brooklyn apartment for a year. "I

made just enough to get by," he said. "I spent most of my time wandering around

and going to art galleries. There was a huge art boom there at the time, and

paintings were selling for ridiculous amounts of money. About half of what I

saw in the galleries was just garbage, but the other half was really amazing."

As he looked at all the pricey canvases in the galleries of Lower

Manhattan and Brooklyn, Eagle said that he began growing disenchanted with his role

as an illustrator. "I was basically solving other people's problems," he said,

"and I decided that this was not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life."

Although he didn't completely abandon illustration, Eagle left New York

after a year there. He returned to Greenville, where his girlfriend, Lisa

Sink--whom he had met on ECU's swimming and diving team--awaited him. They became

engaged--soon to be married--and he enrolled in ECU's master of fine arts

program, where he eventually settled on painting as his primary medium, although he

continued to work in others, too. In commenting on his influences and the

direction his work began to take during his graduate-school years, he said, "I

was looking at everything. I was really into surrealism back then--Magritte,

Dali, Bosch, Breugel. Then, once I hit graduate school, things started

snowballing."

Because his surname prompted some of his fellow graduate students to

mistakenly assume he was an American Indian, Eagle began reading American Indian

mythology and looking at American Indian hieroglyphic images. He started

appropriating some of these images and using them in his own paintings, often

juxtaposing them with other cosmic emblems and mathematical symbols that originated

in ancient Greece and elsewhere.

Around this same time, in 1988, Eagle started thinking about the simply

stylized, linear fish emblems that can be seen on so many car bumpers in

Greenville and throughout the Bible Belt--coded symbols for Christ. "Suddenly," he

said, "it just struck me that the symbol for Christ is a fish, and if I

literally interpret that, I get this image of the Madonna holding a fish." That

inspiration resulted in an image on which he has since played several variations--a

classically derived Madonna who lovingly gazes on a sharp-spined,

prehistoric-looking fish that she cradles in her arms.

Through one of the two arched windows in the background of Madonna and

Fish, as he titled these works, can be seen the dark funnel cloud of a tornado

on the distant horizon. It's another, somewhat more mysterious image that Eagle

has repeatedly used in his work. He cited its origin as a series of dreams

about tornados that he began having in 1989, shortly before the onset of

periodic panic attacks that he said plagued him for about four years.

The latter problem proved to be the result of stress, he said, brought on

by the new experience of parenthood (his first child, Erika, was born in late

1990), the fact that he and his wife had just bought a new house, the

pressures of an impending thesis exhibition, and his cluelessness as to what he would

do for a living once he earned his master's degree. It was reading a book

about panic attacks that led him to understand what was going on and how he could

control it. As he was recovering from this problem, he said, it occurred to

him that a tornado was a perfect metaphor for a panic attack, because "they're

random events that come out of nowhere and wipe out everything."

Further consideration of the tornado imagery led him to think about it as

emblematic of death and mortality. "It's also about not being able to relate

to death in a meaningful way," he said, adding, "If you look down through the

center of a tornado, it's a spiral mandala--the circle ever turning--a sacred

symbol. Maybe that's what my tornadoes are all about. They come out of

nowhere, and that's the way life is. What is a tornado but wind--nothing? But it's

also everything."

Eagle decided some time back, he said, that "I'm not going to spend my

life trying to figure out what art is. I want to see what life is about. Artists

are the ones who should be leading us spiritually and should communicate

about what makes life meaningful and why it's worth living."

Scott Eagle's exhibition, "Theology," will remain on view at the Theatre Art

Galleries through Oct. 27. For more information, phone 887-2137.