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"You can say a lot just by the way a collar is rumpled -- or starched," she continues. "Chairs are also a great help. I put Philip Larkin in a glum, lumpy one, for instance, to go with his potato face. Prim people get striped chairs with narrow wooden arms and legs. Ayn Rand will probably get a practical-looking one with clean cash signs on it; she always wore a little money pin in life, and on a practical little black dress Coco Chanel never would have made or worn…I relish the way Horace describes the hairstyle of a woman: simplex munditiis. It means, loosely, 'simple in its intricacies.' This is the best definition of elegance I've found yet."  

And if Eastland sometimes frets she hasn't strapped, for instance, George Frideric Handel into a sufficiently evincing pair of shoes, it hasn't lessened her esteem in the eyes of her bossman, the incomparable Philip Terzian, who calls her the "ideal colleague."

"Quick, immensely capable, amusing and amusable, diplomatic, shrewd, smart and learned, rolls easily with the punches," Terzian rattles off via email. "And she can draw, write, brews a mean cup of tea and wears a different hat every day."

When the thorny question of whether her status as a worker bee in the right-wing hive -- neoconservative honeycomb no less! -- might diminish her options/opportunities in the art world, Eastland is all unflappable nonchalance.

"I can worry only about what, and how, I make things, whether they are sentences or images," she says. "Super-politicized artwork is often a lot of silent screaming aimed at no one. I think that art has higher, and more lasting, purposes. Some expect that I don't like modern or contemporary art since I'm conservative. This is almost as silly as when someone who, knowing I make art, assumes I'm liberal. When they hear where I work, they say, What! You're a conservative artist! But that doesn't add up! Oh, but it does, depending on what and how you make."

LEST YE HAVEN'T GUESSED, this isn't exactly the character of a compromiser or a shameless self-promoter.

"For better or worse, I tend to be a bit of a clam," Eastland confirms. "I work in quiet, don't enter contests. But I sincerely believe that if you do good work in quiet, that work still speaks for itself."

Or in Eastland's case, screams from rooftops.

topics:
Katherine Eastland