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Inspiration from Artists Week 131 Bonus Artist - MARK EDWARDS

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Jenny Harris

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Welcome to this week’s Bonus Artist.  MARK EDWARDS, a British artist, was born in London in 1951 and now lives in Scotland.  In 1967 he started studying at Medway College of Art and continued with his studies at Walthamstow College of Art in London.  Impatient to start his career as an artist he did not complete his degree but instead taught drawing at a local adult education centre whilst displaying his contemporary artwork in local galleries. In 1974 he moved to a remote cottage on the shores of a Scottish loch, amid an inspiring landscape which gave him the freedom to pursue his artistic ideas, while supplementing his income by working as a ghillie during the deerstalking season.  In 1984 he was signed to a London agency and illustrated hundreds of book covers for authors such as Beryl Bainbridge, Michael Morpurgo and C.S. Lewis. In 2007 he changed direction from his successful deerstalking and fishing paintings and, instead of depicting deer in woodland, placed a man in a bowler hat in a snow covered woodland setting  (inspired by a 1950s photo of a bowler hatted man reflected in the window of a New York street).  This was the beginning of his enigmatic and highly successful ‘White Woods’ series (painted in acrylic) which is very much in the tradition of British surrealism. Other work - 

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IMG_8857

Marjorie Firth

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The first few and I thought of Magritte. The others don’t fit in with that somehow….maybe not a fixed direction yet, but I haven’t looked at his other work…

Tessa Gwynne

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I am familiar with his White Woods paintings as he shows regularly at the excellent Red Rag gallery in Stow. They are quite striking and have a moodiness and feeling of mystery to them. I am guessing that the last five are some of his book illustrations which I hadn’t seen before. Interesting to see the difference.

Jenny Harris

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Tessa,  I think the last three are probably from his wide range of book illustrations and that the two above that are a couple of the deerstalking paintings he did before he started the White Wood series.  It was his White Wood paintings that I first came across, love the style and texture he achieves in them and, as you say, the feeling of mystery.

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Waddesdon Grotesque

Andrew Roles

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I spotted some of the White Woods paintings in a gallery in Alnwick a few years ago, I would have loved to have bought one but didn’t for the usual reason.  I love the surreal nature of his paintings, excellent choice. 

Tessa Gwynne

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His texture is particularly good and I found this entitled The Red Door which I think shows this well, plus a little more colour. As is, and should be the case, his work shows better in the flesh. I’m still not sure what these White Woods paintings are about, but I do like art that has a story to it. I particularly like the book illustration of the chap in his trilby!

Norrette Moore

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Intriguing.  I do like the idea of a series. I wonder if there's a progression to them.

Jenny Harris

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A couple of interesting quotes from two of his fairly recent exhibitions - 

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With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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Excellent!  Not only the paintings, but equally the narrative - not a single "ontological", "synchretic", or tortured phrase in the Higher Meaninglessness to be found: if the price of selling work to gullible punters is the mastery of gurgling gobbledigook, it's a price too high - very refreshing to find an artist who refuses to indulge in it.

Tessa Gwynne

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Yes and thank you Jenny. Interesting to know that even the artist doesn’t know what the story is! 
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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Probably, the artist does know - but doesn't feel any need to blurb; my dictionary definition of "to blurb" -verb: to talk invented gibberish because someone told you the art world expects it; and, like a clot, you thought you'd go with it even though you knew it was just verbiage.   So few older artists indulged in this tripe that I think it must be the case that either art schools, or galleries, or perhaps both, took to advising these abstruse descriptions of that which should not require explanation that the picture itself does not offer.  And young artists, being ambitious souls, fell for it.  What fills me with horror is the thought that they might believe that it could mean something, and thus lose focus on their power to express meaning without wreaths of words hanging over their work like spiders' webs.  
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Carol .

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I like the style of painting. The first painting. Two men dressed in black, two crows. Maybe the men are remembering a person they knew and has passed away, and the crows representing the underworld. I don't know in what order the paintings were done but in the sixth painting there is another shadow on the right . . . an absent friend, maybe. I also like the atmospheric presentation of the ghillie paintings. On the outside looking in, we could make our own interpretation of white woods paintings.
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