NYAB Event - Don Eddy Exhibition

Don Eddy Exhibition

Nancy Hoffman Gallery

This event has ended.

Nancy Hoffman Gallery presents recent work by Don Eddy. Among the first generation of realist painters, Eddy is one of the few who have taken his vision and unique painting process into new subject matter and a new visual arena. In the ‘70s Eddy painted the urban landscape, the California urban landscape, focusing on cars, reflections on the sides of cars, bumpers, headlights. For the past several years he has returned to the imagery of the urban landscape, this time using New York as his prime subject.

Painted in 20-30 layers of transparent acrylic over an under-painting of three colors, (the first being tiny circles about a 20th of an inch in diameter of pthalocyanine green) Eddy’s new multi-panel works are “saturated“ in palette and in subject. More complex and more concentrated than his earlier works, the recent paintings offer the viewer much to experience and savor slowly.

New York, or “the City” figures as the locus around which all revolves in several paintings. In “Evening Calls Sad Anteros,” New York is viewed from a-high, the cityscape becomes rooftops, water towers, building finials, Central Park treetops; a stormy, almost apocalyptic sky looms overhead, creating an elegiac air. Underneath the main panel is a predella of three images. Left and right are sculptural details from a Greek sarcophagus of gods and angels, and in the center blossoming magnolias. As evening falls in the city, the sexual/social hunt begins. It is often predatory and Anteros laments the absence of love in the evening hunt, or in the broader sense could this be the artist’s post 9/11 statement, that New York will flower again and anew, a city of thousands of sparkling windows.

In “Seasonal City II,” a four panel magnum opus, on which the artist worked for a year, Eddy celebrates each season: both autumn and spring are images on different sides of 59th Street, the “bottom” of Central Park, winter is Washington Square Park and summer a vista of the ferry terminals in Battery Park. Cascading through all four panels are branches, golden in autumn, bare in winter, blossoming in spring, and refulgent green in summer. The branches become a leitmotif that creates a rhythmic dance across the surface. Light is as important to Eddy as is the subject matter itself. How light sparkles on the river, how it bounces off building windows, how it casts shadows in the snow. Eddy has “upped the ante” in his depiction of light in this painting, as well as in the other works in the show, which range from daylight radiance to nighttime glow.

In his most recent tri-partite painting, “Mono No Aware,” titled after a Japanese term of esthetics, which means among other things, an awareness of impermanence, and a “wistful sadness at the passing of things,” Eddy bathes each image in sparkling light, cherry blossoms bloom and drop from the tree, fountain waters bubble and are gone, a chimney remains from the joinery building at Jefferson’s Monticello, the only remnant of an historical building. “Things” fade and disappear, light endures.

Over the past several years the artist’s explorations into the mysteries of nature, perception,
and the world around him have deepened. He juxtaposes images in poetic relationship to one another, “echo structures,” as the artist calls these connections. In Donald Kuspit’s book, Don Eddy, The Art of Paradox, the author writes: ”an Eddy picture is a kind of Chinese box in which each stage of consciousness folds into the other, creating an all-in-one effect, giving the picture a magical density and grandeur.” Like magnetic shavings that coalesce through attraction, the images Eddy juxtaposes coalesce through what one might call “attraction,” echo structures of life. When asked about his new work, the artist wrote:

“These works grow out of what I call ‘lived experience’ as opposed to ‘cognitive experience’. The work is not an illustration of an idea, but a manifestation of an existential condition.

“Recently I was reading a novel titled The Historian and came across a passage that helps me write about these paintings. The central male character in the novel talks about taking a
train from Istanbul to Budapest in the early 1900s. He reflects on how the landscape and culture change as the train moves north. He marvels that ‘the landscape itself seemed saturated in history’. I was struck by that observation and mesmerized by the word ‘saturated’. It occurred to me that these few sentences in the novel got at a small piece of a larger experience: it is not just that ‘the landscape is saturated with history’ but more globally every place is saturated with every other place, every time saturated with every other time. Further, one can sense place infused not with just one moment in time and history, but saturated with Time itself. Place and Time become living, dynamic entities of which any place and time is only a localized instance.

“Something like this is at the heart of these paintings. My experience is that every place seems
to echo the heartbeat (even the heartbreak) of another place. Every place summons up the ghosts of each and every instance of history in that and other places. The world abounds in an echo structure, never issuing one sound, but a wealth of echoes through time. And any moment in time seems like a small and contained room in which the floor and ceiling drop away revealing all Time: Past, Present, and Future.”

Also in the exhibition are several colored pencil drawings; each rich, dense and built up over months in layers of pigment. In the works on paper, Eddy zeroes in on aspects of nature, each a poetic evocation. “Night and Day” is a small diptych of night: an equinox moon framed by autumn leaves; day is the reflection of autumn leaves in a rippling river, the duet a tone poem for a season. The most abstract work in the exhibition, entitled “Beatrice,” is the inside of a pale peach-colored rose, the petals unfurled in the fullness of summer bloom. The rose stretches top and bottom, right and left, the outside petals not revealed to the viewer, an ode to life. Unlike the intensity of the other drawings, “Beatrice” seems to whisper the artist’s message of universal spirituality.

Don Eddy was born in Long Beach, California in 1944. He received a B.F.A. in 1967 and an M.F.A. in 1969 from the University of Hawaii. The artist attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, 1969-70, for post-graduate study.

[Image: Don Eddy "Mono No Aware I" (2011) acrylic on canvas, 16 x 50 in.]