Dave Eassa with HereIn
Portrait of the Artist, 2023, oil and spray paint on canvas, 64 x 48 in.
[Image description: A man sits against a bright orange background, where yellow, red, blue, and green hot air balloons float around him. He wears blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and work boots. His feet seem to bathe in green water, where six orange clownfish swim ]
Using vivid color and a mixed-media approach, Dave Eassa’s sculptures, oil paintings, and murals offer the viewer time for reflection on shared human experiences, especially those of loss, desire, and discovering cultural identity. Employing a Fauvist sense of color and breaking up the traditional picture plane, Eassa’s paintings often employ portraiture to take the viewer into a dream-like state of longing. Meanwhile, his love for public sculpture and shared creativity bridges the gap between cultural communities and social systems. He spoke with HereIn Intern Lainey Tomasoski to discuss his work and the development of his artistic and personal identity.
HereIn: I thought I’d start by asking, what are some of the primary interests that drive your practice?
Eassa: I describe myself as an artist and cultural worker; I create paintings and sculptures, and cultivate experiences in my practice. Sometimes I make paintings, that's more of a solitary activity that happens in my studio and a lot of that is self-reflective. My primary interest is people– I dissect the relationships of people closest to me. I am fascinated by how relatable the feelings of grief, longing, love, and a whole host of other emotions can be. My sculptural practice is either individually motivated or a collaborative experience. My cultural work is an extension of my practice as an artist, really just using a different set of muscles to ask the same questions. This took me a bit to understand and see the exact alignment, but I am fortunate to have learned from folks who envision and move expansively. These ways of being have been the primary interests of my practice for the last decade plus.
Lately, a selection of ideas driving my work could be among the following:
Things that bring people together
Redemption, self and collective growth
Building vehicles that can bottle magic
Shared beauty, bringing others with you on the journey
Love
People and Places you don’t know how to know, 2022, Cody Gallery at Marymount University, Arlington, VA
[Image description: A gallery space with Dave’s paintings hanging on bright blue walls. Areas of the floor are covered in sand, lined with wooden planks that make up a boardwalk. A leafy archway in the middle of the gallery is anchored by two larger-than-life cat sculptures, which welcome you into the space.]
HereIn: I like how you framed it as each facet of your practice being a continuation of another and they kind of work within one another.
Eassa: Yeah. As a younger person, it was (and still very much is) challenging to release expectations of what shape an idea will take form as—painting, sculpture, drawing. I am most inspired by creatives who have proven over a lifetime of practice that they listened, and allowed their work to evolve. If the idea wants to go this way or that way, the process will uncover it. And the more ways of working you develop comfortability with, the more rich your world will be with possibilities. Change will always be, I have to remind myself every day.
HereIn: You talk about having questions about things. I think my misunderstanding when I first started to study art was that you are supposed to have an answer to what you're looking at, that the work is imposing a statement on the viewer that they are required to understand immediately. Art is just a question for you. It can bring up a lot of questions, but you don't have to have an answer. It’s only an opportunity to draw those questions for yourself, which I think is everything.
Eassa: The work I’ve been focused on since the onset of Covid-19 has been some of the most honest work I’ve made. The pandemic was really challenging in a multitude of ways, and caused me to question so much that I really just wasn’t ready to question before. One of the most impactful parts of that process was the shared experiences making that work brought up. It was so powerful to have my journey with these hyper-specific emotions, but what I was asking out loud stirred something in others as they went through their own journeys.
I Wanna Hug You, 2021, fiberglass, enamel, and spray paint, 76 x 70 x 28 in.
[Image description: Inside a wooden shed, three abstract human forms are stacked on top of one another in a staggered formation. With exaggerated curves and arms that give a sense of motion, the figures appear to be in mid-embrace, each with an animated smile on their face. Either a vibrant color of fuchsia, yellow, or light blue, the forms give the simple space a sense of warmth and welcome.]
HereIn: Art is that visual component of language or an expression of things that we often have a hard time verbalizing or mentally processing. And I think it's wonderfully multifaceted because you as an artist are able to express those interests, and then viewers are able to visualize their own personal testimonies or what they might not have realized is a shared experience. So for you, what are the most common shared experiences that you work with?
Eassa: Since 2020, I have made work about Love, Loss, and Longing. Three words, huge implications, containers that can hold emotions and experiences as vast and deep as the Pacific.
I think in a bio somewhere, I open it with the statement, “His work explores all the parts of being human; the good, the bad, the ugly, the things that are sometimes too big to say out loud, sometimes are too quiet to make a noise, and everything in between.”
What I've always strove to do in my work is to create motifs and storytelling around fairly simple and accessible ideas. For my work to be rooted in lived experience.To be relatable, and honest. Not always the easiest thing to do, and often I think I am more successful in this than I actually am. It's constant learning and negotiation.
I’ve been experimenting more and more with ways that art could be experienced in participatory or co-created ways. This began as I realized how much resonance and affinity was happening with the questions I was asking. It led to different installations and public sculpture, and influenced the work I got to be a part of at the intersections of art and skateboarding in Baltimore, Jordan, and Lebanon, and now here in San Diego.
A tale about two fish and five loaves, 2022, oil and spray paint on canvas, 72 x 54 in.
[Image description: Against an olive-colored background, two figures are carved out by black stencil; a young boy on the left and an elderly man on the right have a conversation over a table of fish and bread. The foreground is decorated with a thick strip of jasmine flowers.]
HereIn: I’m interested in talking about your experience with People and places you don't know how to know—I know you spoke about your family having origins in the Middle East, and this project was a journey of putting together your cultural heritage. What was this process like emotionally?
Eassa: Again, it comes back to that honesty notion. I started to process things that I previously held to the side– they were too big at the moment, I wasn’t prepared to face them. But, as we all experienced, lockdown and isolation forced me to contend with things I had bottled up. I started making these paintings that opened up worlds of visual language for me. I waded through these big scary feelings, processing the loss of a best friend to gun violence, and the installation in the Shed Space about the collective isolation we all were a part of. I kept coming back to this complicated relationship to identity, understanding family lineage in relation to ourselves. Our house was cooking quite a bit, returning to recipes that felt like home, that felt like Love, that felt like my Sito’s care that I knew when she was still with us. The Eassa’s have origins in Haifa, Akka, and Beirut. As you might expect, food is love, food is care, food holds such specific memories for me. During this time, I became acutely aware of the monumental loss. Everything that was written in my Sito’s hands, in her kitchen, all of that family history that I didn’t spend nearly enough time to hear the stories, to write down the recipes, to learn more about our family. I realized that there was also this longing and loss around this relationship to where I came from and where I wanted to be.
Ahlan wa Sahlan, 2021, made in collaboration with Majed Abu Dayyhe, Siner, and the habibis and habibtis of 7Hills, Amman, Jordan
[Image description: A group of young people work on a vibrant mural on a large wall in a skatepark. The mural includes six figures hugging, which are recognizable as Dave’s work.]
So, I realized that for me to get a deeper understanding of who I was, I had to go to the region my family comes from. I am so fortunate that I was able to work with the team at 7Hills, an organization that leverages skateboarding and art to support youth in Amman, Jordan. The two things that have driven my world for as long as I can remember are skateboarding and art. I am eternally grateful for the time I spent with Zakaria, Majed, Esther, Kas, Hakiem, and the entire community in Amman. So much love for this group of folks who took me in. I got to work on sculpture projects, a large scale mural, and skateboarding classes. Zakaria and I went to Beirut to join up with a crew of local and international skateboarders with Make Life Skate Life to build one of Lebanon’s first public concrete skateparks.
This was life changing for me. It led to a body of work I am really proud of, People and Places you don’t know how to know, a solo presentation at Cody Gallery, curated and gracefully stewarded by Cailtin Berry. It led to a greater understanding of myself, who I was and who I seek to be.
Reflecting on this process in relation to myself and our current time is not easy. The past year has been horrifying in ways that words do not have the ability to articulate.
Mama’s Boy, 2023, oil and spray paint on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
[Image description: The painting’s background is broken into three vertical planes—the center a bright yellow while the two outer sections bear a fruit pattern. In the center, a woman bends down with her arm around a child. Monstera leaves seem to sprout from the pair and a red squiggle moves across the painting’s lower register.]
HereIn: What is the focus of your work right now? How have your past projects influenced the direction of your current and future works?
Eassa: I am have been really focused on painting and drawing right now, as well as immersing myself in a new creative community. It took me a while to get excited about making., I took a bit of a break in late 2023 after a really wall-to-wall year prior.
I was fortunate to have a few opportunities in 2024 to get the blood flowing again, a sort of self-directed residency in my friend Colleen Veltz’s Liberty Station studio followed right by a residency with the best folks over at Art Produce. An artist, community builder, and friend that I really admire, Morgan Mandalay, brought together a loose monthly gathering of Painters talking Painting, discussing the joys of pushing colored goop across surfaces and breaking bread together. All of these things, plus a bit of distance that I took in 2023, have been really inspiring. I referenced making honest work earlier, and that’s been something I’ve been trying to understand on a deeper level, and see how far I can take that notion.
Music for flowers, 2024, oil and spray paint on canvas, 64 x 48 in.
[Image description: A Black woman dressed in purple and blue walks in a an abstracted landscape. Her arms are outstretched and her eyes are closed, as if with pure joy. Musical notes and flowers float whimsically in the air around her.]
I’ve also really been inspired by live performance, in ways that I really didn’t think about before. We went and saw our friend Dijon playing here at Snapdragon, and I was really struck by how honest and vulnerable it felt as he performed his music for the crowd and then he did it again throughout the rest of the tour. It’s funny how visual artists might toil through work for a while, but then it’s there. It made me think of how I could explore bottling that energy into static works. I have no answer for that yet though, just been on my mind.
In the coming year, I’m excited to work through new bodies of painting, to tattoo again here in San Diego as I get a bit more space, seek public art opportunities, and continue to learn about and become a part of this wonderful scene. I am also working on a two person exhibition at Easy Does It Curatorial Space in Los Angeles opening next year, with a good friend of mine Charles Mason III. I am really focused on and excited for that.
It’s complicated, 2024, oil and spray paint on canvas, 64 x 48 in.
[Image description: The outline of a small boy sits on a pink background. Below him is a blue area, dense with fish. Flowers grow alongside him and a dove floats over each of his shoulders. A blue smear of paint runs across the width of the painting, moving over the boy’s face yet leaving his features visible.]
HereIn: How has moving from Baltimore to San Diego affected your practice?
Eassa: Life has been really transformative since I got here, in the best and most challenging ways. I described it to my wife, Ashley the other day, that I’ve never been so happy and excited about a place or a moment like this. At the same time, I’ve never been challenged in ways like I have over the last 18 months. We left behind a whole world back home, a city that we loved dearly and it loved us back.
San Diego as an art scene is special. It’s small, it's scrappy, and it welcomes you in. Folks here are genuinely excited to link you up with their friends and peers, to draw connections right away. I am so thankful that early on, I got to know and befriend inspiring artists who move with intentionality and care. Bottom line, the scene here is made up of really good people.
I’m really grateful for folks like Trevor Amery, Morgan Mandalay, and Elizabeth Rooklidge, who I got to meet early on, and who wrapped me in a big hug and have become key parts of my life.
San Diego as a place has been unreal, there is something really special about waking up and seeing the Pacific every day, getting in the ocean most days. It’s not something I ever thought would be part of my reality, and I am really just enjoying every bit of it I can. I’ve never been in a place where you are surrounded by people whose idea of hanging out is getting up before sunrise and getting in the water for as long as possible before sprinting to work. It’s absolutely incredible, and so different from the routine I used to know. I love the homies. I think when it comes to people, more is truly more.
This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.