Forget brushes, Daniel Eatock is painting with rolling pins

“A painting is often an attempt to paint the illusion of three dimensions, be it a still life or abstract. Depth, space – a window to the world… The Rolling Pin Paintings are made to break this illusion, they are very flat,” Daniel Eatock tells It’s Nice That. A bit like dough or pastry, the artist’s works are rolled out flat from blobs of coloured paint, a series of abstract, stretched shapes emerging from the act. “Colours collide with the rolling and the action creates the composition using the location of the paints’ application as their starting points”, Daniel explains. Rather than a painter, Daniel likes to refer to himself as “a facilitator” in the creation of his flat artworks as in the act of rolling he is “allowing what is meant to emerge”.

A natural progression from the inventive process of his Felt Tip Prints, these abstract paintings are as much about the act of painting itself as the result. Pieces where two halves of his abstract compositions spill into a central horizon line are the result of an observation Daniel made from a stack of blotting sheets in his studio, which he was using to remove excess paint from his wood panels in order to achieve their clean, flat effect. These scraps combined “rolled shapes and colours that haphazardly overlapped” and he instantly knew he wanted to make something out of this byproduct of his process – “ quite like making a meal from combining leftover food”, he says. From collaging sheets together, in these works Daniel is “seeking moments of serendipity, alignment and harmony, attempting to understand the fluid nature of colour and its relationship to form”.

Something that is always satisfying about this series of works, no matter what scale, is Daniel’s wonderful, graphic colour combinations that overlap edges to mix and make new hues. These happen quite by chance, the artist tells us, and are completely dependent on how he feels on the day: “I don’t discriminate against colours. I use all the colours from the spectrum, sometimes on one painting [...] certain combinations resonate with me more than others”, he says. “I try to hold back on my own personal preference and put all painting out into the world. My intention is that different people with different tastes will connect with the painting that is ‘right’ for them.”

Continuing to roll out colour, the artist recently published a collection of his paintings in Risograph form in a book by Temporary Press. Before the book’s conception the artist cleverly realised the ink drum in the Riso machine and the rolling pin he uses for his paintings are the exact same circumference. “This is a very pleasing fit!” he exclaims. This editorial project celebrates the fit of the form, exploring the reproduction of Daniel’s process with the Risograph, a print method that performs a similar action of rolling ink onto a page with a large colour drum.