courtesy of the artist
"Late July and Early August," gouache and acrylic on paper, 24″ x 25.5″, 2016
In 2015, we wrote about St. Louis artist Greg Edmondson on the eve of his departure for Belle, Missouri, for a residency at the Osage Arts Community. He's spent the last three years living and painting there in a little house with an interior that's more like a loft, with ample room to move easels around, affix works-in-progress to the walls, or to pace and think. He's also hung out with a rotating cast of poets and artists in residence, dodged wild turkeys, skunks and deer galumphing across tiny rural roads, and spent lots of time on the snaky, north-flowing Gasconade River. All of these experiences (and many others) bloomed through his new paintings, which are now gathered into a 108-page artist's book, Rivers and Beasts. The hardbound edition was released last fall by Spartan Press/OAC Books, and the paperback version is now being readied for press.
As Edmondson wrote in his preface, he arranged the work not in chronological, but intuitive order, since the paintings follow a course "much like the river itself; there are places where things flow smoothly and the surface appears calm and clear, there are points at which things constraint forming rough rapids and shallow eddies where ideas circle endlessly back on themselves, and there are moments where things simply overflow their banks with paintings spilling from tables and flooding the walls."
Though he's always made work inspired by science and nature, his earlier pieces often referenced phenomenona invisible to the human eye, such as audio waves and cells. As the title and the four sections of the book make clear (“The River House,” “Up on a Hill, or The Color Purple,” “After the Flood,” and Lost and Found in the Forest, or Do Not Drive in to Smoke") these paintings are more earthy and immediate, with more references to things you can see and touch, including houses, prairie burns, forests, or the Gasconade at flood stage. Yet they are still abstract (even though that abstraction is softer and more organic-feeling) and still shiver with a supernatural aura. Gallerist Philip Slein, who began showing Edmondson's work 20 years ago, hosted a release party for the book earlier this year. "His art, both sculpture and painting, is a personal vision of the natural world which is filtered through, and intertwined with, science and mythology," he says. "This potent amalgam creates a unique and multileveled reflection on the physical and ethereal worlds, and how those two collide with the human condition."
The book contains 61 paintings, produced over the course of 30 months at OAC. Truman State University art department chair Aaron Fine, who was in residency with Edmondson, contributed the introductory essay for the book. What he tried to explain there, he says, is how Edmondson is "pursuing a kind of formalism without dogma, essentially pushing hard at those so-called ‘formal elements’ of color, line shape, etc. and finding out just how surprising, or informal, that visual world is."
courtesy of the artist
"Winter Garden II"
Of course, presenting the world as a visually surprising place is challenging when you have been haunting the same old streets for years. As Edmondson wrote in his intro, Belle is barely 100 miles away from St. Louis, but it feels much further. This new work flowed out of that shift from a big city to isolated farm populated by “painters, poets, and photographers, printmakers, playwrights and writers of young adult fiction, composers, musicians, publishers, professors, pranksters, alcoholics, vegetarians, vegans and ribald eaters of meat” not to mention “eagles, osprey, herons and hawks, woodpeckers, flycatchers and owls that howl, bobcats, coyotes, armadillos, opossums and brazen raccoons, river otters, fleet foxes, sneaky skunks and so, so many deer, snakes, lizards and frogs, turtles and tortoises, ticks, beetles, spiders and moths, unaccountable swarms of ladybugs (more instances, arachnids and arthropods that one may even believe), goats, chickens and hogs...cattle and dogs.” Fine describes these new paintings as a move away from "disciplined exploration of data points on paper" to a visual evocation of emotional and spiritual upheaval. "Happily for us," he writes, "the result is a breakthrough."
Courtesy of the artist
Edmondson in the studio.
Lisa Halley Melching, who did the photography and book design for Rivers and Beasts, is a fan of the new work, too. She says as she was working on the book, she felt like she'd "stepped into a candy shop. I literally wanted to lick some of these paintings! As I examined each piece through the lens, and again on screen during editing and layout, I found the intensity of color, texture, and shape simply delicious. I certainly have my favorites, but each piece stands on its own."
Fine adds, vis a vis his essay: "Maybe I should just have said 'Look at these paintings, this is what you get when you take a good artist and leave him to paint every day for several months in a row. Because that’s what this is."
The paperback version of Rivers and Beasts will soon be available at local bookstores; until then, they can also be had straight from the artist (via voegel60@gmail.com). For more information about the book, visit Rivers and Beasts Facebook page, or go to gregedmondson.net.
