Wendy Edwards

Wendy Edwards (born 1950) is an American artist known for vibrant, tactile paintings rooted in organic forms and landscape, which have ranged from representation and figuration to free-form abstraction. Her work has been strongly influenced by the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement and its embrace of ornamentation, repetition, edge-to-edge composition, sensuality and a feminist vision grounded in women's life experience. Critics note in Edwards's paintings an emphasis on surfaces and the materiality of paint, a rhythmic use of linear or geometric elements, and an intuitive orientation toward action, response and immediacy rather than premeditation. In a 2020 review, Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid wrote, "Edwards's pieces are exuberant, edgy, and thoughtful ... [her] sweet, tart colors and delicious textures make the senses a gateway into larger notions about women and men, creation and mortality." Her work belongs to the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum (RISD), San Antonio Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Karamay Museum (China), among others. She lives and works in Rhode Island with her husband, painter-sculptor Jerry Mischak.

Life and career Edwards was born in 1950 in Falls Church, Virginia, and spent much of her childhood outdoors on a farm near Washington, DC. During graduate studies at the University of New Mexico (MA, 1974), the dramatic southwestern landscape and light and the plein-air landscapist Charles Field made an impact on her work. and had solo exhibitions at the Stables Art Center (Taos) and Dart Gallery (Chicago), among others. In her later career, Edwards has exhibited at the RISD Museum, Russell Janis Gallery (New York), OH+T Gallery (Boston), and Mystic Museum of Art, among others. In 2019, a 40-year retrospective of her work, "Luscious," was presented at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. Her paintings often bear referential and provocative titles, evoking double entendres or sexual innuendo. Her mid-1970s landscapes were expressive, rough geometric interpretations of her Taos surroundings; Her late-1970s paintings employed idiosyncratic, crudely painted symbols and motifs arranged in succinct modernist structures and rendered with thick impasto surfaces, rhythmic brushstrokes, and calligraphic marks recording gesture and movement. the longer-running "Nets" and "Veils" works, begun in 2001; and flower-motif works initially based on "doodles," which sometimes employ collage, starting in the later 2000s. Thematically, the paintings explore contrary notions of exposure and coverage, containment, and seepage. She painted more voluminous floral abstractions in subsequent works (Dreamboat, 2013), some of them nestled together like scoops of ice cream or in larger networks, as in Tipper (2012), which incorporated squirmy, yellow cut and collaged fragments from a Mexican oilcloth.