Visual artists
Visual artists
working on 'Tree of Life I' (1988)
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Joan G Edwards After a first career as an art teacher, Joan Edwards enjoyed a second of over three decades devoted to her own painting, producing a body of work establishing her as a unique and immediately recognisable figure. Clearly related to the particularly British tradition of artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, her work was constantly evolving, her last works exploring the full stylistic range from figuration to complete abstraction. While all her paintings carry an identifiable stamp, her most characteristic works are probably those which combine detailed observation of natural forms - plants, stones, landscapes - with a fantasy of an at times bewildering complexity. With a solid technical foundation in drawing, calligraphy and oil painting from the West of England College of Art in Bristol after the Second World War, she found her real voice with the adoption of gouache as her preferred medium in the 1980s, relishing its quick drying characteristic and exploiting the wider range of effects it allowed her, from a limpidity close to watercolour to a dry-brushed celebration of the physicality of paint more commonly associated with oils. In this as in her visual language she demonstrated the independence which characterises all her output. Works are in private collections in the UK, Europe and Australia. A complete catalogue is in preparation. |