Alfred Eaker is a prolific fine arts painter and muralist, an award-winning filmmaker and film critic, and a traditionally-published author.

Following on the success of his debut novel, “Brother Cobweb,” Eaker is currently collaborating with Todd M. Coe on the related Graphic novel “The Brother Cobweb Chronicles.“

On top of being an award-winning independent filmmaker, Eaker has been a film critic (for 366 Weird Movies) for almost a decade. His essays for that site have been published in the yearbooks and quoted in various film biographies.

Look inside “Brother Cobweb”, a novel by Alfred Eaker

“An American Seeker”: Alfred Eaker’s current project

As an American artist, Eaker has always been deeply engaged into the social and political climate of his country. Eaker is currently working on a mural painting — commissioned by Steve Gray — entitled “An American Seeker.” By taking Elvis Presley and his legacy as a starting point, Eaker is exploring issues of aim, identity and hope so desperately needed at this moment in America. For more info on the whole project, click HERE.

Reactions to Alfred Eaker’s work

In his career as an artist, Eaker’s work has been paradoxically labeled as degenerate, orthodox, heterodox, modernist, mystical theology, provocative, academic, and blasphemous. Indeed, blasphemy is a language that Eaker seems to speak fluently, even when he doesn’t mean to, and he’s been doing it through painting, performance art, independent film, and film criticism for three decades.

Eaker extended bio

Eaker was born in the Midwest in 1964. He grew up in an intensely religious household. Although Eaker’s family was an extreme mix of contrasting faiths, he was predominantly exposed to what he calls, “dyed-in-the-wool, ho de ho, sawdust on the floor, backwoods Pentecostalism,” which he rebelled against at an early age. Encouraged to draw during church services as a way to keep himself occupied, Eaker’s interest in art intensified to an almost obsessive degree.

After high school, Eaker attended John Herron School of Art for two years. During that period, he painted and produced what would be the first in a series of videos, and worked at a series of jobs. Eaker never regretted dropping out of art school: “I learned what I had to learn and got the hell out of there. Besides, by doing so, I lived up to the anti-academia spirit which was so prevalent then.”

Alfred continued to paint prolifically and showed in a number of galleries in the Midwest. After befriending two priests, Alfred converted to Catholicism and that became an intense subject for his art. One of his major projects was the large mural, “Modern Spirituality,” at St. Vincent De Paul in Indianapolis.

After dabbling in public access and performance art for a number of years, Eaker started an independent film company and has produced a number of independent films: the feature “Jesus and the Gospel of Yes,” the short “Behold the Man” (about his friend and fellow artist, the late Ed Sanders), a second feature, “W The Movie,” that surreally satirized George Bush, and two short films for the 48 Hour Film Festival, “Hallow’s Dance” and “9.” Eaker has recently finished a feature length documentary about artist Raymond Thunder-Sky and the Cincinnati gallery named after him. In addition to “Thunder-Sky,” Eaker is in the early stages of an existential film, entitled “Stations,” which he is collaborating on with artist Wendy Collin Sorin, poets John M, Bennett and Sheila E. Murphy, along with filmmaker James Mannan.

Alfred Eaker at work