On March 19 an exhibition of new work by Don Eddy opens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery and continues through April 30.

Eddy is one of the few early Photorealist painters who has taken his vision into new terrain, and has expanded his unique painting process. In the ‘70s Eddy painted the California urban landscape, focusing on cars, reflections on cars, bumpers, headlights. The subject came naturally to the son of a car body and fender shop father. The artist moved quickly from cars to storefronts to shelves filled with glassware and toys.

Eddy’s work of the past four years takes him deeper into the exploration of nature, perception and life’s mysteries. His multi-panel paintings take on a quiet spiritual aura in their contemplative examination of earth’s riches; as well as the magic of the night in the cities he visits. The artist’s subject is as much light as is the manifest content; he paints, as catalogue author David C. Graves writes, ”images that he has meticulously crafted out of the substance of his life’s experiences. He manipulates those images, as if distilling them so as to capture naught but their very essence. He universalizes those substances, so as to make them rich enough for poetry and accessible enough for us to engage.” Some of his new paintings are triptychs with three sections, others are polyptychs with four or five wooden panels. For the past several years Eddy has returned to the urban landscape, this time New York; as well as his experiences in nature, celebrating light and season in the energy of the ocean, a mountain at sunset, a lotus in full bloom.

Painted in 20-30 layers of transparent acrylic over an under painting of three colors (the first being circles about a 20th of an inch in diameter of phthalocyanine green, the second being burnt sienna and the third dioxazine purple). With these three colors he separates warm from cool colors, and then begins to add many layers of transparent color to achieve the final palette of each work.

Image:
Don Eddy
WDAS II, 2018
acrylic, colored pencil on panel
9 x 12 inches