During her time living in the UK from the late 1960s-89, Eleonore Koch produced a number of lighthouse scenes. Their compositions closely mirror the artist’s photographs from trips to Wilhelmshaven and Emden in East Frisia, Germany, with the lighthouse’s stepped structure also resembling Beachy Head Lighthouse in East Sussex, a short journey from London. Comparing her paintings using repeated motifs such as the lighthouse, it becomes clear that they are less topographical landscapes and more imagined compositions, with the same features frequently transplanted into different settings. The quiet stillness of these scenes, devoid of people, and the unusual perspective created by the extended planes of block colour contribute to this surreality, diffusing Koch’s paintings with a dreamlike quality.

Reflecting on her time in Europe, Koch stated that she had always felt like an ‘intruder’ (1). Dislocation is a common theme in writing on her work: as an immigrant to Brazil and then a foreigner in London, her pictorial world is both a synthesis of objects and influences from her various homes, and its own suspended reality. Her paintings are not records of distinct places and moments in time, but a separate world that she built around herself as a permanent home.

During her time in London, landscape scenes featuring the coast, as well as Europe’s city parks and gardens, became subjects of intensive study – an ongoing exercise in clarifying her painterly world. As a result, her palette became dominated with blue and green tones; her pigment collection, which has been preserved, included seven different cobalt blues (2). Her London paintings are therefore distinguished by a different atmosphere to her early work produced in Brazil, often imbued with a cooler northern light.

Koch’s career-long dedication to the discipline of egg tempera is one of the most important factors contributing to her highly singular style. Using egg as a binder results in a purity and intensity of hues unmatched by oil. Despite this richness of colour, the surface, built up of ultra-thin layers of paint, retains a luminous, ethereal quality rather than a solidity. As tempera dries very quickly, only small areas can be worked on at one time, leaving a texture that lends itself well to the broad expanse of sea.

The coast sees Koch’s embrace of simplicity and reverence for colour taken to the greatest degree, with the figurative elements secondary to the vast stretches of blue, delineated by a white line that encapsulates the essential character of England’s chalky south coast, without seeking a faithful representation.

1 Eleonore Koch quoted in Fernanda Pitta, 'Chronology,' in Paulo Venâncio Filho and Fernanda Pitta, Lore Koch (Cosac Naify, São Paulo 2013).
2 Pia Gottschaller, 'Eleonore Koch and the Brazilian Egg Tempera Revival' (unpublished).