DON EDDY: THE RESONANCE OF REALISM IN THE ART OF POST WAR AMERICA An art history monograph Internet publication by Virginia Anne Bonito, 1999. Published by ArtregisterPress.com. © Virginia Anne Bonito, 1999. All rights reserved.
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Chapter 1: Excursions

There is nothing that stands out in Don Eddy’s background to suggest that he would develop into one of the foremost Realists of the Post War 20th century. However, an early litmus reading was given by H.W. Janson, the distinguished Art Historian and author of the now classic college survey text, the History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of Time to the Present Day. In his revised second edition of the History of Art published in 1977, he added comments on new movements that had established themselves since the first printing of the text. He included “Photo Realism” among them and chose a single artist and a single image as a representative example. (Footnote 1) The artist he chose was Don Eddy; the image was New Shoes for H, 1973-74. (Fig. 1.) Alongside Don, there were a number of prominent practitioners associated with Photorealism whom Janson could have chosen - notables such as Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Ralph Goings, Robert Cottingham, and Charles Bell. All were producing sparkling and visually complex images of the contemporary environment. (Footnote 2)

Fig. 1. Don Eddy, New Shoes for H, 1973-74, acrylic on canvas, 44 x 48 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

Perhaps it was serendipity, or, perhaps it was a calculated choice that guided Janson's decision to use Eddy's New Shoes for H. A quarter of a century later one thing is clear. Don Eddy’s oeuvre is distinguishable by an evolution - led by an evident and unbroken process of problem solving - that few masters achieve. In the text that follows, we hope to follow Eddy's development of craft and imagery, as well as to identify the distinct phases in his work that mark this evolution. Don Eddy was born into a working class family in Long Beach, California, on November 4, 1944. His parents divorced when he was a child. His father had studied to be a classical violinist, but an accident that damaged a finger brought an abrupt end to those aspirations. His children, however, did inherit his artistic talent. Eddy senior opened "Eddy’s Garage", primarily a body shop for automobiles. Don worked on and off for his father in that shop from ages ten into his college years. Uncannily, and unbeknownst to Don at the time, Eddy’s Garage provided the first apprenticeship for his career as a painter. There, as a youngster, he learned sanding, priming and taping. By age thirteen, he got the airbrush that he quite intentionally still uses to paint. In Eddy’s Garage, Don learned two things that he maintains have had the strongest impact on his artistic technique. He began to think about paint as a thin liquid; and, under the tutelage of Willy Gano, he began to color match paint - that is, to mix a color with fresh paint that would match the older weathered surfaces of the cars that came into the body shop for repairs. Don also developed an impressive repertoire of pin striping and flaming (the detailing for cars and bikes so fashionable in the 60's and 70's) that became popular with bikers and streetcar racers. For a short time he set up a competitive business of sorts to his father's, specializing in ‘paint jobs’ on vehicles. Little could he have imagined that these bikes and cars would become the first important principal subject matter of his professional studio work. Other job experiences laid further ground work for his artistic career. For a time he refinished grand pianos becoming skilled with stains and varnishes. Then he opened "Eddy Surf Boards" where he designed, fabricated, and painted custom surfboards. This continued interchange with the materials of popular culture embedded in him a sympathy for the quotidian that was to give direction and character to his entire corpus of professional work. His romance with the sea - a recurrent, forceful pictorial and poetic element in his work - began at about this time. In 1964, he left California for Hawaii to ride big waves and to attend the University of Hawaii, Honolulu (1964 - 69) where he earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees in the Fine Arts. A stint in the Navy reserve from 1967 - 69 assured continued connection with the sea. Don's turbulent early life, matched by an iconoclastic and rebellious spirit, mirrored the turbulence of the '60s society at large. With hindsight, we recognize how short lived America’s post World War II euphoria was. Just a little more than a decade later - in the period when Eddy was reaching maturity - we, as a country had assassinated our new political leadership, were on the threshold of a cold war with Russia, and were on the brink of insidious guerrilla wars in Asia. Student riots swept college campuses. The art world too was being turned on its heels. As if the extraordinary challenge of Abstract Expressionism was not enough, post-war extensions of Dada and Surrealism, in the form of Color Field painting, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Op Art, Assemblages, Installations, and Happenings tumbled onto the scene at a breakneck pace. Don had thought of a possible career as an artist, but this impulse was shut down early on primarily by sibling rivalry. Don had a sister who was considered to be an incredibly gifted artist. Responding to the mood of the moment, he turned to political science as a major in a junior college, but was assured by the experience that he was not suited to an institutional career. Only when his sister finally rejected the possibility of a career as an artist, did Don begin to think in earnest again about his own pursuit of art as a profession. He left California for the University of Hawaii where he initiated his career in the Fine Arts - a decision that marked a turning point and profound shift for the direction of his life. His impulses to make and to paint objects had found their true course. Likewise, his obstreperous spirit could be channeled positively in a search for the unorthodox, for anything outside of the norm - the norm, in the art world of the mid-60's, being abstraction. Armed with the full gamut of undergraduate and graduate Art History, he looked beyond abstraction with the aim of developing his own innovative responses to early modernism. He honed his technical skills in studio courses and through teaching courses on materials. Taken together with his academic courses, and inquisitive nature, this experience led to a burgeoning understanding of the traditions of painting as a formal discipline and as a powerful form of personal expression. It opened the door to a profound and continued dialogue with the nature and art of painting.

Don’s first works of note were life size, mixed media pieces of wood, cast plaster, and oil. They marked a response to Picasso’s “classical” period, to Marisol, to Wesselmann, to George Segal, and to Tiepolo’s paint and plaster trompe l’oeils. Yet they were more than just an academic parody or synthesis of environments, of assemblage or of combine elements - the format that allowed innovative combinations and juxtapositions from the abstract to the concrete, from two-dimensional rendering to the three-dimensionality of ready mades and sculpture in the round. An early work, Angels of Destruction, 1967, makes this clear. (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2. Don Eddy, Angels of Destruction , 1967, mixed media, destroyed.

There is no mistaking that Angels was a product of the mindset of contemporary art. It nonetheless holds its own as distinct and forceful in its own right. Angels of Destruction was intended as a reaction to the Vietnam war. Its aggressive message, managed with orderly coherence, is conveyed by a controlled reductive palette and a militaristic rigor in the repeated figure set against a geometric background. The figural elements are a penetrating, ironic farrago of popular culture wrapped in 60's ideology. The anonymous apocalyptic “Angels” - helmeted hybrids of the good soldier, GI Joe, and the infamous "Hell's Angels," members of Don's former biker clientele - stand elbow to elbow suggesting an internal face off of National Guard troops and fierce free spirits. Emblematic of the freedom of speech that our democracy allows, they are set against an American flag. Eddy's representation of the flag is not only a reference to our National standard or banner, but is a witty allusion to what, in the art world, had become the standard or signature of the Pop artist Jasper Johns. Eddy appropriated this highly charged image as a means of mirroring the similar challenge being put to American art and society, referencing both the stir it caused in the art world as a symbol of the rethinking about image, object and art, and in the political arena as the emblem of a nation being put to the test of a new value system.

Several more experiments along the lines of Angels of Destruction were followed by a series of 'cutouts.' (Refer Fig. 3, Prodigal Son Cycle: There is no Escape, as a representative example of the series.) The 'cutouts' signaled another form of response to contemporary, object-oriented movements including Pop Art. However, they also represent a response to the work of the early 20th century masters René Magritte (the Belgian Surrealist) and Marcel Duchamp (the master of Dada). Not coincidentally, the work of both artists had an enormous impact on 20th century popular culture such as advertising and by inference upon Pop Art itself. (Footnote 3) With the 'cutouts', Don began to dig into the fund of Art History. As early as 1929, in "Les Mots et les images," an article published in the last issue of André Breton’s La Revolution surrealiste, Magritte maintained that objects, images and names had no necessary or unalterable connections; this seminal line of thought fed many important currents throughout the twentieth century. (Footnote 4) Inspired by such concepts, Eddy used 'cutouts' to pose an analogy between the verbal and the visual domain. He postulated that language orders visual experience. The way we learn language impacts how we experience the world. Children learn nouns first, they identify objects; then they learn adjectives and pronouns. Verbs are the equivalent of time and space. Intent on eliminating space, he produced 'cutouts' whose shapes were underscored by neatly defined borders. The 'cutouts' allowed experiments with pictorial conditions based both on the notion of the picture as object (or as a lexical equivalent) and on the relationship between object and space that henceforth became central to his work. He has continued to contemplate, to explore and to mine these notions throughout his fertile career to date in unique ways, as for example, in the 'floating toys' scenario of the color series paintings (See below Chapter IV) and in the multiple panel paintings of the mid '90s.

In works such as Prodigal Son Cycle: Calling and Apple seemingly irrational juxtapositions rule. In Calling, the integrity of an image of the artist’s father is disrupted by rectangles respectively containing a skyscape in place of the features of the face and a landscape in place of the lower half of his body. In Apple, the pronounced bite marks of a half-eaten apple provide the rhythmic contour of the 'cutout;' like the father's face, the fruity meat of the apple is also replaced by a skyscape. These 'containered' skyscapes and landscapes are transformed into objects as well by their own precise, discrete edges. An unyielding tension between figure and ground overtakes the entire image, from the contoured boundaries that identify the works as objects, to the internal shifts between figure and open sky. Each element in these 'cutouts' is flawlessly, democratically and palpably defined so as not to detract from the study of equivalencies. In Prodigal Son Cycle: There is no Escape, 1968, a third component - intentionally maudlin emotion - was added as an irritant to the delicately balanced equation. (Fig. 3)A faceless father - with luminous sky in the place of features - opens his sweater like a curtain to reveal a 'cut-out' within a 'cut-out' of Don’s dog set against open sky. The dog 'cutout' is located exactly where the father's heart should be. Fig. 3. Don Eddy, Prodigal Son Cycle: There is no Escape 1968, acrylic on masonite, 36 x 24 in. private collection.

The avenue of exploration offered by the 'cutouts' yielded some fruitful results, but led ultimately to the realization that even though the 'cutout' functioned to convey an object, objects imply space. This is not an earth shattering observation. However, it piqued Eddy's own creative curiosities and impulses to the point that he decided to confront the issue of pictorial space and illusionism head-on. Other issues began to be identified as well through the experiments of the 'cutouts'. For one, Eddy had questioned and was skeptical of the importance given by Abstract Expressionism to the palpable mark or hand of the artist, so he began intentionally to depend on his airbrush as a means to eliminate obvious signs of technique that might distract the viewer from ideation. On another front, the image of the dog in There is no Escape came from an old photograph; up to this point the images had been imagined or drawn from life. The experience of incorporating the photograph into his working method encouraged him to begin to depend on photographs as a tool in his process of image making. Finally, the Prodigal Son Cycle, as its title suggests, provided a catharsis for an inner crisis of beliefs posed by family and faith. We will come to understand in later chapters how important his art was to Eddy as a means of self-discovery. At the University of Hawaii, art students were quite free to experiment with different modes of expression, a departmental policy of which Eddy took full advantage. Notwithstanding this fact, Abstract Expressionism was taught as the favored style of artistic expression and with it, the theory advanced by the American Philosopher and Aesthetician, Susan Langer, that art is the ‘manifestation of felt life.’ Puzzling the meaning of such a concept, Eddy sought to explore its possible implication as he began his own early artistic odyssey. Jean Charlot (much influenced by Diego Rivera, Orozco and the Mexican Mural Renaissance), the preeminent artist in Hawaii, and a Professor at the University, offered a balance to the equation by teaching Don to keep an open mind and to examine possibilities. Charlot was not sympathetic to the concept that modernist artists are in opposition to the past, and rather, taught that artists are a part of an historic continuity. This insight opened all of art history to his students as a continuous resource and sounding board for the creative process. Inspired by Charlot and being quite rebellious, Eddy began to struggle in earnest with the problem of pictorial illusionism, though the later '60s were still fraught with issues about conservatism and modernity, and pictorial illusionism was still quite unfashionable. He also began to look more concertedly to his own background and to material culture for subject matter.

Eddy's response to these various influences and impulses was a group of paintings, perhaps the most significant of which was a biting image featuring a laboratory rat undergoing an experiment. (Fig. 4. The Rat, 1969). Surely this fit Langer's concept of art as 'felt life.' The open sarcasm was directed at Abstract Expressionism's proprietary attachment to that notion and, at its immutable corollary - the ‘necessary’ exclusion of figural imagery from modern art. Furthermore, the subject matter of The Rat - 'animal brutality' - provided a timely subject that made it a highly representative emblem of the moment in which it was created. It vibrated 'contemporaneity' through Eddy's novel reformulation of an important precept of Pop Art as well; the painting's source was a picture in a scientific journal, printed by a commercial printing process in thousands of copies for commodity based distribution. Subject matter and compositional format - a detail excerpted from its reference points - were, by choice, both charged with tension. Fig. 4. Don Eddy, The Rat, 1969 acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in. private collection.

The message behind the subject matter posed the challenge of issues of ‘humanity' in the face of seemingly unquestioning, futuristic faith in science. The composition posed the challenge of the advanced illusionism of the probed rat, trapped in its 'Borg'-like armature, to a flat surface of white that could be readalternately as neutral ground or as the surrogate of atmospheric space. Eddy understood that the areas of canvas left bare needed to be painted white to properly impose a tension between illusionism and flat surface; had he left the canvas unpainted he risked suggesting tension between support and pictorial surface rather than between flatness and volume. While painting The Rat Eddy tripped into an important technical breakthrough. He wanted to find a way to use black in the painting, but a particular quality of black that had a vibrational quality, or, life to it. He began to experiment with superimposing virtually transparent layers of color one on top of the other, and discovered that the overlapping of pthalocyanine green, burnt sienna and dioxazine purple produced the desired effect. He immediately discarded the traditional painting techniques he had been using in favor of developing a system that depended upon the application of these three colors applied in very thin layers. Over the course of his career he has continued to expand upon these early discoveries and to employ this technical system exclusively in the fabrication of his paintings. This highly innovative, original technique that is so integrally bound to Eddy's artistic process and to the message and impact of his paintings will continue to be a focus of discussion throughout this text. It would be useful at this juncture to direct our attention to another important condition Eddy began to address in the 'cutouts' and The Rat; that is the impact of photography on American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Many artists in the vanguard of the resurgence of American Realism after World War II were born in the 1930s and 40s. They were the first generations, especially if they were from a middle class background, whose primary experience of the world depended on a photographic model. (Footnote 5) By the mid '50s, the visual language and symbolism of painting and sculpture - the primary media of the fine arts - had become highly personalized and esoteric from the standpoint of the common man. On the other hand, photography and its cohorts - magazines, billboards, advertising, TV, and movies took the place of painting and sculpture as the dominant universal mode of visual representation for images drawn from the world at large. It alone, whether in the form of photojournalism or art photography, was allowed to scour the contents of the globe and all of the various manifestations of life on it as subject matter for its message and its imagery. Interestingly, in its own right, this expansive aspect of photography and photojournalism was crucial in opening the door anew to the possibility of veristic formats for painting and sculpture, and thus provided an essential stimulus for the resurgence of Post War American Realism. Furthermore, photography provided those in the vanguard of Post War American Realism with surprising new possibilities for their paintings - either through the incorporation, in various ways, of photographs, printed material or images of photographs into their working process, or through their simulation (for example, as notable in the work of Robert Bechtle or Audrey Flack).

A series of paintings, entitled Waiting (#s I - V), are an after-image of Don’s Hawaii years and continue his preliminary inquiries into the components of traditional picture making. He now determined to focus on the fundamental role of the figure. Again, a part-time job provided a more than serendipitous key to not only his short but to his long-term artistic development. He worked as a tourist photographer taking snapshots of happy vacationers at the Honolulu airport. In his down time, he began to explore image making with a camera. He took photos of senior citizens in their leisure time but with a very studied slant that he translated into paintings. The seniors are presented as solitary beings, for the most part sitting on park benches, absorbed in their own thoughts. Their environment is all but cancelled out. Their monumental scale, described in an elemental manner, recalls the twentieth century classicism of Picasso and Rivera. Their attire hints at apparent recreation, but a stark light and the bench or picnic table as the single reference point for their placement in space signal otherwise. Much of the natural world is excerpted as if to point out that the aging process has taken its toll and that their casual solitude is a poignant road sign of ebbing vitality and interaction. In this group of paintings, Eddy arrived at an exquisitely controlled formal solution for the expression of what was to become a lifelong preoccupation, the anatomy of pictorial illusionism. Fig. 5. Don Eddy, 12:45 Waiting V, 1969 acrylic on canvas, 54 x 44 in. collection Stuart Margolin.

In 12:45 Waiting V, 1969, (Fig. 5) the picnic table establishes a diagonal vanishing line in a carefully choreographed tango with two point perspective. Again the artist calls upon neutral white, but this time more complexly interwoven, like the pieces of a puzzle, with the carefully described figural elements (including fabric patterns and fortuitous geometries). Like the perspective, the white ground plays a complex spatial game. In addition, it is weighted with psychological implications; it resonates the ennui of the characters, suggesting their process of 'letting go'. Mid sixties artists had no common visual language or symbolism upon which to depend. Eddy and a handful of his pioneering colleagues, (though at this early moment unbeknownst to each other) looked to their backgrounds, to the stuff of daily life, to their middle class environment, to the new tool of photography, and to such technological, commercially oriented implements as the airbrush as the footing and fuel for their artistic endeavors. In the flush of possibilities presented by mass media and the commercial arts, it seems only right that a gamut of commonplace items in the hands of young mavericks should launch the newest Realist movement.

 

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| HOME | FRONTISPIECE | DEDICATION | TABLE OF CONTENTS | PROLOGUE | NOTE to the READER | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |

| CHAPTER 1 | CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 3 | CHAPTER 4 | CHAPTER 5 |

| FOOTNOTES | LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS | SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY | LIST of NAMES & SUBJECTS |

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