Wendy Edwards in conversation with Ruth Fine, 11.15.19
Luscious: Paintings and Drawings By Wendy Edwards, Wendy Edwards in conversation with Ruth Fine, November 15, 2019 at the List Art Building, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Wendy Edwards’ artworks are bold and exuberant, marked by her masterly use of color, her exploration of the physicality of media—primarily oil pigments and soft Sennelier pastels—and her abiding commitment to a feminist vision.This retrospective exhibition—including fifty-six paintings and drawings—spans the four decades of work that Edwards has created since joining the faculty of Brown’s Department of Visual Art in 1980.
Edwards came of artistic age in the late seventies, when Pattern and Decoration (P&D) was a prevalent artistic movement. Positioned as a response to minimalism, P&D embraced color—which Edwards acknowledges as foremost among her artistic passions—and decorative patterns drawn from textiles that were often associated with “craft” and gendered as feminine, women’s work.
Throughout her oeuvre, Edwards chronicles and responds to experiences relating to her travels, to events in her personal life, and to her interest in nature and natural forms. In the mid-eighties, she traveled to China for the first time. The landscape, so foreign to Edwards, is reflected in images of imbalance. Rice paddies shift diagonally and horizon lines tilt in Elephant Trunk, 1985, and other works from this period. An image of a baby refers to the birth of the artist’s daughter, Georgia. Other travels have left their mark: in drawings of icebergs, produced during a residency in Newfoundland in 1998; in motifs from Pennsylvania Dutch furniture and ceramics in works for an exhibition in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1993; and in drawings of lace coiffes, hats traditionally worn in Pont-Aven, where Edwards taught during summers between 1995 and 2011.
Iconic compositions of centrally placed objects—flowers, leaves, neckties—appear often in Edwards’ works from the late eighties and continue intermittently to the present day. Opulently rendered cross-sections of fruit (Georgia Peach, 1989; and Fig, 1991 ) are reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual floral imagery—an association with sex that Edwards makes explicit in a stunning, gestural painting titled Dickhead, 1993. Painterly abstractions led Edwards to more experimental mark-making—the application of pigment extruded through cake-decorating tools. Combining the decorative with geometric abstraction, Edwards created works in which wavy-edged ribbons of pigment defined patterns of concentric squares. In another approach, seen in Blue Net, 2001, she fashioned “nets” that overlie grounds of flat or swirling color. The nets remained a major force in Edwards’ work for more than a decade, later employed in combination with elements such as flower blossoms or vases, which they obscured or enhanced.
Two strains of work have occupied Edwards over the past decade. The first was a foray into collage employing Mexican oilcloth. While in Comillas, Spain, Edwards began to use this patterned material as a convenient substrate for paintings. Later, she combined fragments cut from oilcloth with her distinctive nets, creating images like Tipper, 2012, that harken back to P&D.
The second strain continues her fascination with natural forms. A series of small-scaled paintings of flowers reveal Edwards’ dialogue with earlier art. Examples include Monsieur Ed, 2009, in dark brooding tones of brown, black, orange, and white, and Watteau’s Gift, 2009, rendered in pastel pinks and blues. Flourish and Mounted, both from 2019 and the most recent works in the exhibition, are reinterpretations of Van Gogh’s irises.
Friday, November 15, 2019
Brown University
Auburn Coach Wife Kristi Malzahn Agrees with Match & eHarmony: Men are Jerks
My advice is this: Settle! That's right. Don't worry about passion or intense connection. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling Bravo! in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It's hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who's changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Obviously, I wasn't always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry's Kids aren't going to walk, even if you send them money. It's not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it's downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.
Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends, feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there's supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn't feeling it. But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my single friends, it's unlikely.
And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, do we feel confident that she'll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It's equally questionable whether Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)