rofound art, for painter Don Eddy, is art that "both implicitly speaks to its own culture and time, yet has the ability to transcend it."
An experience he had with one of the 35 works currently on display in the exhibit Don Eddy: From Logic to Mystery at DUMA illustrates what he means. When the 1970 painting "Bumper Section XXI" was presented at a show in Essen, Germany, in the early '70s, Eddy says, the Germans didn't quite get it-they did not recognize the painting's subject as part of a Cadillac. So while American audiences were seeing "Bumper Section XXI" within its original cultural context, Germans were relating to it differently, through the abstract organizational aspect.
This abstract organization was also what most struck Nancy Hoffman, the gallerist who discovered Eddy in the late 1960s. She immediately recognized "a different approach to urban culture and the urban landscape..., a real freshness," Hoffman explains. Similarly, Michael Mezzatesta, director of DUMA-who brought this exhibit to the University-says that, "I have always admired his work" for its representational style.
Eddy himself summarizes his entire oeuvre as "contemporary representational art," a description that highlights the fact that he paints recognizable objects such as cars, toys, flowers and glass. This reliance on verisimilitude puts him at a disadvantage with culturally sophisticated art connoisseurs, he believes, who look down on representation, but gives him an advantage with the "masses," to whom much modern art is inaccessible.
In reference to his own lower middle-class background, Eddy says, "I've always wanted my art to make sense to a broader range of audiences," and as it turns out, people from all walks of life enjoy his paintings. Mezzatesta adds, "Because he's a realist painter, there's an immediate connection that can be made" and emphasizes that just because it looks real, this form of art is "not more facile."
Art critics have divided Eddy's work into three distinct (though overlapping) phases, a separation Eddy tolerates: "I let people cut up the pie any way they want to," he says. Hoffman agrees, explaining that the division is merely "a descriptive handle for some people to get into the work."
umper Section XXI" belongs to first phase, and to the movement commonly known as photorealism-a term Eddy objects to as being commercial rather than philosophical, instead prefering the European hyper-realism. Hoffman, too, finds this categorization problematic and adds that Eddy's "conceptual basis.... sets him apart from other photorealists." At the same time, Mezzatesta points out, Eddy's work of this time was considered important enough that he was chosen to represent his 'school' in art history textbooks.
In the paintings of this period, Eddy says he is particularly
The painting is divided into three planes: the relief object which is represented, the flat, illusionistic relief surface of the physical painting, that is, the two-dimensional painting itself, and the reflection visible in the chrome parts of the bumper, which reflects back into the viewer's space. Eddy is also interested in the nature of perception. In quotidian perception, he says, we don't see everything that is around us (which would be impossible), but focus on something in particular-a process Eddy calls selective attention (or inattention). In contrast, in his art, he wants to "try to force [the viewer] to become equally attentive to every part of the painting."
hile Eddy maintains that his artistic concerns have remained fairly constant over the course of his career, he points out that in some paintings of the mid-'80s, he became particularly intererested in the nature of experience. He says, "It is my contention that we don't ever 'see' the world directly, but experience it through the veil of our past, our acculturation, our hopes, dreams and failure."
In "Jerome's Dilemma" (1985-86), for instance, this interest in the past is expressed in the use of an older painting, Simon Vouet's "St. Jerome and the Angel" (c. 1625), which is covered by a layer of floating toys, fruits and vegetables. While the objects in the foreground are actually more 'real'-as opposed to an angel-they come across as more flat, Eddy contends. Even though the Vouet layer is a painting of a photograph of a painting, he says, the angel "seems to have more substance."
Mezzatesta adds that these pictures show that Eddy "comes out of a long tradition of representational painting that goes back to the Renaissance"-some of the pictures he uses at this time are actually Renaissance paintings. According to Mezzatesta, Eddy has "fully assimilated that vocabulary."
In this period, Eddy wanted to introduce more color back into his paintings and for that purpose went to Woolworth, where he proceeded to buy $300 worth of toys in 10 minutes-toys because they can be any color, and so many in such a short time so that he would not be thinking consciously about his choices. The store staff, he says, did not seem surprised by his behavior at all; they were "quite tolerant-this
inally, in his more recent work, Eddy has undergone a "really big shift from highly didactic and conceptually based work to work that is fundamentally democratic and based on a poetic model," by which he means that enough remains unsaid (or unpainted) to leave the 'completion' of the work to the viewer. As Mezzatesta puts it, the viewers have to "make connections between the different parts," engaging in a kind of "leap of faith." In formal terms, Eddy has moved from the one-subject paintings of his first period through the layered works of the '80s to compositions that are segmented as triptychs or as paintings with even more distinct parts.
These compositions, Eddy says, come to him in their completed form. He claims to have "not the foggiest notion of what they mean to me," but merely to be painting what he feels is an imperative vision. In the 1993 triptych "Imminent Desire and Distant Longing II," for example, he has imagined three distinct nature panels that relate to and contrast with each other on a variety of levels: the diversity of elements (sky, water, plant), the different forms of movement (clouds arrested in the sky, water erupting over a waterfall, flowers planted firmly in the ground), the varying color schemes (dark clouds, shining water, colorful flowers). According to critic Virginia Bonito, the "dark brooding underside of the cloudbanks, and the unbroken wall of woodlands relieved only by light, introduce an element of tension and foreboding that keeps us ever mindful of inevitable confrontations with fate and dark force." This atmosphere is also captured in paintings such as "After the Storm" (1993) which shows a red hibiscus flower glowing with water, in front of an ocean, after a rainstorm.
Eddy wants his more recent compositions to be understood as "a celebration of what I will call ontological mystery, the mystery of being." He does not intend to unravel this mystery, but only to present it to his audience. With these paintings, he has introduced a spiritual, Christian mysticist aspect to his art, which is also tinged by an interest in the connections between Christianity and Buddhism.
ddy finds it impossible to summarize his work-"I would have to be able to do that about my life to be able to do it for my work," he says. Similarly, the title of this exhibit-From Logic to Mystery-describes a trajectory of change rather than an ouevre. In contrast, however, Hoffman finds something of a continuing thread going through Eddy's paintings: an interest in "light and reflection." It is these themes, and the realist representation in his work, that allow Eddy's work to transcend its time and that make it accessible to everyone.
Don Eddy: From Logic to Mystery runs thru May 21. For more information, see calendar, page 11.
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