Ewan David Eason: A Golden World

Ewan David Eason is an artist and printmaker, born in 1982. He attended Bath Spa University, where he graduated in Fine Art. He now lives in London.

Inspiration

The artist has always studied cartographic history, from which he takes great inspiration. The first maps to represent the entire world belong to the medieval era and can be dated around 1300. An example is the Hereford Mappa Mundi (from Latin means Chart of the World) in which the globe is represented by a circle. They took this choise not because the ancients believed that the earth was flat, but because they referred to verses in the bible in which the earth is exposed as circular.

The circular shape is a main feature in Ewan David Eason’s work and we can see that from his first piece of art. It represents London and the central point of the map is where he proposed to his wife.

Another major inspiration for the artist is Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Booth conducted a social and economic survey that revealed that most Londoners lived in extreme poverty. Their discoveries formed the basis of Booth’s color-coded social mapping. With the use of color, Booth identified the economic and social level of a certain area, for example the black areas were whose inhabitants were more prone to crime. In the same way the artist uses the color gold to define his maps sacred.

Mappa Mundi

Creating an abstract image from a map the aim of his work. He uses precious metals, such as 24 carat gold leaf, to create magnificent prints of maps with a high level of accurancy. The artist’s current and most complex project is creating a chart of the world by making every single city on earth. Although this may seems an impossible mission, the artist has already created as many as 177 works representing cities from allover the world, from Argentina to Switzerland, from Holland to New Zealand and so on.

“The thing about maps is that when you remove all the streets names, words, anything that can defines a certain, it becaomes an abstract image”

Ewan David Eason

Not only Gold

The artist also creates amazing works of art using other colors besides gold, because he has always been interested in the study of complementary colours and contrasts between various chromatic ranges. Experimenting with other colours and materials is a fondamental feature of the artist’s work. For instance, the artwork where the four cities overlap each other in an infinite tangle

City fields is another serie by the artist in which is present a rich green colour. The consept behind these works is a re-imagination of cities if they were made of different fields. Another interesting aspect about this project is how he tries to give a stained glass look to the maps, although they are actually made of a very thin paper. In the case of London’s artwork it is a lightbox, while the New York’s one has no lighting in the back.

References

Artist’s website

Artist’s instagram

Byardart.co.uk

Atlasofplaces.com

Featured image: Mappa Mundi Edinburgh – Black on 24 carat gold leaf