In the studio with artist Eloise Dörr

When did the character/blob first show up and why?
This character I paint has been a bit of a development over the last 6 or 7 years. When I was first interlinking my love of skating with my love of art 7 years ago, I found just drawing skateboarders as humans quite limiting. For example, if you draw a limb a bit too long or too short on a human, it instantly looks wrong. This made it really limiting to express a lot of movement, which is what I was ultimately trying to achieve. So I started drawing lanky stick-people-blob-like-things with really exaggerated movement and long limbs. These eventually developed into the blob like character that I paint today!

What are your inspirations in your illustration?
I think I have 2 separate inspiration collectors in my brain, one for the theme and one for colour palettes. The theme inspiration collector (I’m just going for this analogy now haha) is always skating with my friends, it sparks the same excitement in my brain that painting does, so it was natural to link the two together. My colour inspiration collector comes from artists like David Hockney, Anna Ancher, Toulouse-Lautrec and loads others I can’t think of right now. Ooh actually I’m really into Allison Miller and Prudence Flint at the moment, they both create really great colour palettes. Also the weather and nature inspire a lot of my colour palettes too.

What is your background in skateboarding?
I started skating about 6 or 7 years ago, I’d just left school earlier than expected as I got ill and missed too much school to continue. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my life, I was just drawing all of the time and had a little blog for my drawings. I came across an old Girl video somewhere and I was instantly enticed haha! It basically just grew from there. I skated by myself for the first couple of years until l moved to London, went to a few girls nights and met the ladies who are now my London family!

What’s a typical day like for you recently?
I basically live at my studio at the moment haha! I go home to sleep and shower, but it’s been a really busy few months. What I do at the studio differs; I’ve done a few collaborations with some skate companies over the last couple of months, done a few commissions, event prep etc. But the last 2 weeks have been solid exhibition prep. Doing the last few paintings, then just all the other prep that these things entail. I’m writing this interview amidst a pile of vinyl cut outs I’m sorting through haha.

What’s this new show all about?
I start every year knowing I want to do a solo show at some point in the year, I rarely know what I want to do or where though at that time. Around February I started to play around with light and shadow in my paintings, and came up with a little mini series of my character skating down some city streets at night with big blocks of light shining through in 1 place of each painting. I started to really connect with this new theme and knew I wanted to do a show creating larger versions of these paintings on thick bits of birch. I felt like the big flashes of light put against the soft muted blues kind of reiterated the contrast of the loud rumble of pushing down the street on a quiet night. But that might be my inner art-douche coming out haha! I e-mailed Stance to see if they wanted to support this show and gave them the brief, and they offered their Covent Garden gallery space to me for it! I was really stoked.

Where would you like to take your illustration? Where would you like to see the blob appear?
I’d like to travel more with my work I think. I’m going to the south of France in July for Lucas Beaufort’s “The Art Camp” which I’m really excited about! So I’d love to travel more with my lil dudes and place them all around the world haha!

What would you say would be an ultimate career goal?
To have a retrospective of my career after I die at Tate Britain. Just kidding haha! I just want to keep working as much as I can, to keep doing shows and to collaborating with great people!

Oh, and your pet hates?
Hmmm… I think when people scrape their teeth along the fork/spoon when they eat. That makes my spine seize up hahaha.

Eloise’s solo show, “Blue and Other Colours,” opens at the Stance store in London on June 15th, 7–10pm. 

Interview: Hannah Bailey