Don Eddy is singular among contemporary realists. In the tradition of master artists of the past, his craft and imagery are in a continual process of rethinking and evolution. This evolution is marked by distinct identifiable phases in his work to date.

His earliest paintings feature cars whose sleek curves and chrome bumpers were already the vehicle for studying reflections (an artistic preoccupation of Eddy's throughout his career), and for setting up formal and compositional problems; for example, the repeated image varied principally by color. The initial choice of subject was given by Eddy's background; he worked for some time in his father's auto repair shop. It was there, in fact, that he learned to use the airbrush, which remains his preferred and trusted painting tool. Even in this early period, Eddy's art was never pure reportage. He began to explore the relationship of depicted objects to the picture plane, imposing chain link fences, for example, across the entire picture surface (perhaps as a play on the transfer-grid system as well).

He moved quickly from these works to depicting automobile showrooms with cars seen inside large glass-enclosed spaces, and then shopfronts, all of which featured a growing complexity of the image based on the transparency of showroom windows and images reflected in them. Pots and pans, meats, vegetables, and especially shoes mingle with ghost images of cars, patches of cityscape, the uncanny melange a perfect celebration of the surfaces and vibrant, artificial colors of the material culture of middle America of the Pop generation.

In the mid-1970s, Eddy began a more rigorous, analytical exploration of the formal problems posed by reflective and transparent surfaces. Monochromatic silver and glassware densely grouped on the glass shelves of mirrored display cases were the vehicle for this study; color was notably absent in this phase. By the early '80s, denser and even more complex arrangements of objects superseded the silver and glassware in the mirror-and-glass display cases. The objects themselves, five-and-dime-store brands of children's toys—plastic figures of favorite Disney characters, model planes, marbles, toy musical instruments in high colors—added ever more challenges, and vitality, to the increasingly intricate, virtuoso images.

In the '80s, in the so-called "dream" paintings, the toys also appeared as floating elements combined with other imagery—familiar cityscapes (views of Paris for example), appropriated details from famous Old Master paintings (Carracci, Caravaggio, Vouet), architectural details, photo-quality renderings of his daughter reading, etc.each constructed with its own spatial references, setting up new tensions among traditionally integrated segments of the picture, high color, and ambiguous space. The combined imagery and the resultant images introduced a dimension of psychological overtones equal to the perceptual challenges posed to the viewer.

It should be noted here that a leitmotif that has governed Eddy's artistic odyssey depends first on his recognition that twentieth-century perceptions are governed by technology, (note: "Technological innovations such as artificial lighting, photographic and telecommunicated imagery, instantaneous information, render obsolete the chiaroscuro and timelessness of traditional realist painting." Alvin Martin, "Spaces of theMind: New Paintings by Don Eddy," Arts Magazine, February 1987, pp. 22-23.) and second on his receptivity to twentieth-century investigations into the psychology of perception. Such concepts underpin his unique painting technique (described in detail in the article by Martin), his restricted palette, his use of twentieth-century artists' tools (especially the airbrush), his investigations into the nature and perceptual properties of color and of pictorial space. In fact, in his fascination with the pictorial surface, Eddy, it seems, has run the art historical gamut from Alberti to Magritte and beyond.

By 1990,Eddy imposed another demand upon his artistic expression: to consolidate and simplify his imagery. For this he turned to still life and to nature. These latest pictures are quintessential Eddy—they are informed by and benefit from all of the avenues of investigation identified above. Yet they are the fulfillment of an artistic gauntlet fraught with challenges—the investigation of ever more rigorous formal problems, refinement of media, and the search for imagery—posed by the artist himself at the highest intellectual, emotional, and technical level. Their clear and simple beauty is their strength. Whether a burst of light through clouds, the windswept surface of an ocean, a branch of a flowering tree seen against a blue sky, an architectural detail, or a school of fish, each image is the perfect expression of the consolidation of avenues of investigation—cerebral, emotional, spiritual—to which Eddy has devoted himself throughout the course of his career. If these images are scrutinized, the source of their vitality can be identified. Their focused cropping and framing, their proximity to the picture surface, their luminosity and palette, their complexity of surface but simplicity of form and structure all contribute to the stunning impact of this latest phase of Eddy's work. The heightened visual experience of these images downplays the other senses; the eye—in the Leonardesque role of receptor of knowledge—is overwhelmed.

Aqueous Lumina ([1993]; a lumen is a measure of flow of light) is one of Eddy's more recent paintings. Featured is water flowing from a Hercules fountain, surf crashing on rocks, and water trickling from cupped hands. Fountains are not only a source of water but provide an artful display; the sea is an untamed, boundless source of the life-giving liquid, which, as presented by Eddy, atomizes on the rocks in a splendid expression of exhilaration and transformation; water in the hands of man might be considered a precious natural resource. The subject is a perfect vehicle for Eddy's brilliant handling of the effects of reflected light, and of water as an illuminative entity. It takes the viewer further by far than the surface shine of polished chrome, glass, or silver, to the wonderment of nature and man's glorification in it as artificer, observer, charge, and protector. Eddy has tapped and modernized Gothic and Renaissance pictorial formats for the triptych used in Aqueous Lumina. Each of the three fields of the triptych focuses on specific images that are distinct yet interrelated. Each field of the triptych is made more powerful by the strict limitations imposed on the images, which stand as symbols for elemental, archetypal concepts. Placed in concert, the three fields create a forceful dynamic both visually and thematically.

The archetypal nature of these images, and their obvious power to evoke emotional response, leads us to the realization that in this latest stage of his evolution, Eddy has crossed yet another boundary. Paintings such as Aqueous Lumina are fundamentally democratic, in the sense that the viewer completes the work, both by bringing personal associations to the imagery and by using the images as vehicles for contemplation. The weight of the imagery is less allegorical and symbolic than visionary and instinctive. It is the case with this later group of paintings (also including Krishna's Gate [1995], and Catena Aurea [1996], in our collection), that, rather than offering solutions, they are a celebration of mysteries directing to higher consciousness. Water is an ever-present protagonist, and while it always has spectacular tactile qualities, it also stands for states of being—for example, agitation, peace, the strength of mutability. The optical richness and density of the images insist on their reality, and they in turn become divining rods, and the artist, the seer.

Catena Aurea, the Golden Chain, addresses the mystical lexicon. Like the portals of Chartres cathedral it is intended as a summa; in this case, an ontological one of meditation on the chain of being. It is intended to direct thought to states of being and of human capability. Even its format functions to this end. There is no defined starting point; each image is equal in size and importance. The squared circle implies eternity and the points of the compass; the four elements are represented, whether in their natural state or referentially, as are physical properties—frozen, fluid, solid—and nature and man's ability to make structures, to decorate; there is a memento mori (in the detail of a Gothic stone carving), and so on. From his earliest work to these most recent paintings, Eddy's canvases have been the most rarefied sort of scratch sheets in service to investigation into and meditation upon the grand design.

©by Virginia Anne Bonito, Eddy "Get Real" essay, July 19, 1998.

 

For a more detailed printed view of the collection order the book:
	Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection Virginia Anne Bonito. Foreword by Michael Philip Mezzatesta, pp. 138, 68 colorplates, 2 b/w photographs Exhibition at DUMA April 4-July 6, 1997. Hard cover $40.00 Soft cover $25.00 To order contact: Duke University Museum of Art Click on Publications