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 5: Poetic Resonance

By 1990, with nature as a guide and through experiments with personalized versions of still life and landscape formats, Eddy began to deconstruct, simplify and consolidate his imagery. Alongside the experiments of the early '90's, represented by works such as the "Dreamreader's Table" series, Brightly Colored Numen and After the Storm, which we discussed in the previous Chapter, Eddy also developed an entirely new format for his paintings. The paintings that follow this new organizational principle represent a dramatic adjustment in tenor and intention; they are quintessential Eddy. They are informed by and benefit from all of the avenues of investigation identified in the preceding chapters. They are the fulfillment of an artistic gauntlet fraught with many challenges posed by the artist himself at the highest intellectual, emotional, and technical level, foremost among which was the investigation of the resilience and potential offered by picture-making through the systematic study of more and more rigorous pictorial formats. In conjunction with this investigation, Eddy had discovered and developed a new technique that brought the picture surface into harmony with pictorial structure, composition and subject matter. In these pursuits he achieved a remarkable congruence between his art and later 20th century sensibilities. The great strength of the latest group of work is its clear and simple beauty. Each image, individually and as part of a whole - 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 - is the perfect expression of the consolidation of those avenues of investigation (cerebral, emotional, and spiritual) to which Eddy has devoted himself throughout the course of his career. Scrutiny of this newest body of work reveals a decidedly different artistic identity, vitality and level of vision. Focused cropping and framing; proximity of the image to the picture surface; luminosity and palette; complexity of surface but simplicity of form and structure - all familiar devices honed and refined through skill - contribute to the stunning impact of this latest phase in Eddy's work. The heightened visual experience of these images overrides the other senses; the eye - in the Leonardesque role of receptor of knowledge and window to the soul - is overwhelmed.

Ideas that led to this latest body of work began to formulate around 1988. In An American in Paris II, 1988, and Memory and Imagination, 1989 - the paintings that followed Escape from Dog Island with its map, aromatic rose and bonbons - Eddy placed gourmet and travel magazine-like images of beautifully prepared and presented food into the borders surrounding regional landscapes. (Fig. 80) These light-hearted paintings represent a necessary step in his working process of the need to visualize an idea. In this case, the idea was to drive home points about how the heightened realism and strategic organization of visual images, experienced through the eye can drive perception towards associations lodged in memory belonging to senses other than the eye itself. For example, the visual encounter of finely detailed images of juicy entrees that, not accidentally, intersect landscapes resembling photographs of favorite travel spots might jolt memory of pleasant moments and good food to the extent that it might even stir the appetite and, perhaps, prompt a visit to a restaurant. Such images were meant to engage the mental functions of memory and recall, even if the places and food had, up to the point of encounter with the image, been experienced only through pictures in magazines and through the media. The aim here was to emphasize the later 20th century phenomenon of the flood of images, available from all aspects of life, that impacts our experience of life and the world at large, but, especially the sense of feeling like we know something that we have not actually experienced. Fig. 80 Don Eddy, Memory and Imagination, 1989 acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 in. private collection.

Fig. 79 Don Eddy, After the Storm, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in., private collection.

These few experiments in the late '80s were soon followed by increasingly more majestic views of seascapes and landscapes of the sort we encountered in After the Storm, set off by dramatic skies and awe inspiring effects of light. Once again, photography was an important reference point, especially the special effects of photographic images one finds in travel magazines, or, on conservation-oriented calendars that are geared to draw vacationers or prompt respect for natural resources through striking images of unspoiled terrain. The rationale for the development of this imagery was embedded in Eddy's understanding of several mechanisms at work in contemporary life. The one mechanism, which have just noted, is our connection to the world at large, even to notions of existence, through the flood of commercially printed material that is in every corner of our lives. Another depends upon the availability and experience of travel to a large sector of the population. In other words, people can escape the hustle and bustle of daily routines by going on vacation. We search out a dream spot, such as a secluded island, where we can commune with nature and in so doing perhaps regain something of ourselves, or, we locate a country rich in tradition, history and monuments where we can encounter our collective past. If we have chosen successfully we might even refer to our travel experience as 'picture perfect.'

Eddy understood in the reverberation between advertising travel photography and the 20th century commonality of travel experiences - whether real or potential that belongs to a large portion of the population - the phenomenon of being able to be transported by imagery alone. In other words, if an image of a perfect secluded island reverberates properly it will be able to carry the viewer to some level of experience of it through feigned reality or intuitive imagination. Clearly much of the history of image making is bound up with believability and the ability to convince of its own realities. The point here is that, with the expanded reference point of 20th century experiences of travel, certain kinds of images becomes super-believable. On a different plane of existence and by analogy, one could argue that if an image of nature perfected is properly configured it could elicit the condition of inner quietude or excitement associated with an imagined personal encounter with the divine. Within this notion one might be tempted to identify an uncomfortable alliance with what are often conceived of now as maudlin concepts associated with Romanticism. But locked within the true Romantic nature was a driving spirit of adventure and expansiveness that saw the origin of and fueled every advance made in our century, from altered states to interstellar and virtual reality. The Romantic belief in our recognition of and desire to connect with forces much greater than our very fragile own continues to be operative, in so far as these impulses are bound, in any moment in time, to the truth of the response of the higher nature and intellect to that which is 'awe inspiring'. It was these qualities of our perception and cognition, along with the recognition that ontology is not the counterpart of existentialism, that Eddy determined to address in his newest body of work. The other insight operative in the late '80s that Eddy engaged in earnest in the early '90s, was the exploration anew of the relationship of 'image,' 'word,' 'concept,' and 'meaning.' In so doing, in one way, his art had come full circle; in another it provided the shift of direction towards the open territory ahead towards which he was driving. Eddy revisited his impulse to excerpt and reorganize pieces and parts of the natural world into constructs. This impulse had manifested itself early on in the cutouts, prompted the overlay processes belonging to his painting technique and to the structuring of images (realignment / breakdown of form by reflection, floating toys, cascading, etc.) and led, as well, to the grouping of related ideas into sets. In the '90s, Eddy once again found new expressive potential in this impulse. The paintings of the '90s are the latest and most evolved response by the artist to his preference for the accumulation and interaction of distinct, diverse imagery that began with the early "Prodigal Son series," and that found itself manifested in the multiplicity of reflected images in New Shoes for H, and re-expressed in the collage-like environment of paintings such as Persistent Memories II. (Fig. 81)

Fig. 81 Don Eddy, There Is No Escape (Prodigal Son); New Shoes for H (detail); Persistent Memories II (detail.)

The by-product of these developments, redirected afresh through invention and put to new purpose, found its form in the multi-panel arrangement of Celestial Expectations, 1992, one of the first paintings of the new body of work. (Fig. 82) In a manner of speaking, this new format of multiple, distinct panels presented in a specific order represents a denouement, or unraveling, of the complex overlay scenarios of the 80's, exploded and reordered but retaining the function of a single work of art. Serial structures, systems, repetition of forms, grid formats, and the like were favored devices of the Minimalists (especially sculptors like Donald Judd, on the one hand, and Beverly Pepper, on the other) and of "New Image" artists like Jennifer Barlett. In 1976, Bartlett had stunned the art world with Rhapsody - composed of 988 square steel plates, uniform in size, silk screened and painted in enamel. Eddy was fully aware of Rhapsody and of Bartlett's work in general.

Fig. 83 Leigh Behnke, Messier's List, 1997, oil on panel, 14 x 45 in., private collection. Reproduced by permission of the artist

However, more direct inspiration came to Eddy through his wife, Leigh Behnke, who was a conduit to structuring of this kind through her own work. Behnke, a noted Contemporary American Realist in her own right, began her distinguished artistic career as a sculptor. She made monumental welded pieces featuring planes moving through space - the sensibility connected very much to architectural massing and to the properties of architecture to shape, impose character upon and define space. In her shift to painting in the mid '70s, the basic premise of her art remained unchanged. She continued to focus on a fascination with the articulation of space but she also began to find worthy subject matter in dichotomies such as order and chaos / the celestial and the terrestrial, and in the study of the underlying mechanisms of things. It was in 1976, the year Rhapsody was 'unveiled,' that Behnke presented a system of sequential panels in her own work as an associative device to explore theories of perception. The seminal investigations of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century vanguard movements in art and photography provided the point of departure for her study. Her intention was, for example, to make representational versions of Josef Albers's famous Squares (late modernism’s first true serial art), colorist versions of Muybridge’s stop-action photography, and to deconstruct cubism. Behnke continued to introduce other complex scenarios into her paintings directing them to investigations not only of times of day, color shifts, and intriguing compositional geometries but to plays with interior and exterior space, with their corollary, the picture plane, and with mechanical movement. These experiments of late '70s and early '80s laid the groundwork for the beautifully crafted, skillfully manipulated, and complexly intriguing mature paintings. Behnke also developed a variant of her favored sequential format in which there could be primary and related subsidiary panels, much in the manner of the principal panels and predellas of Renaissance polyptychs. While she has continued her investigations of perceptual and formal problems, the paintings function increasingly as vehicles for exploration of scientific observations as well. (Footnote 61 & Fig. 83) The dialogue shared by the dynamic duo of Behnke and Eddy continues to be an important wellspring for Eddy in the formulation of ideas that are central to his work. An encounter with the medieval world, through a comprehensive exhibition held in Avignon, provided the final ingredient in the mix of influences that led Eddy to develop his multiple panel arrangements. At its perfected best, the architectural and decorative programs of medieval cathedrals, especially Gothic cathedrals were meant to be a summa theologica, an encyclopedic visual illustration of the basic tenets of the faith as manifested in the celestial and terrestrial domains. The narrative and symbolic programs were spelled out visually through sculpture, carved reliefs, stained glass, and in the accoutrements belonging to services. Thousands of pieces and parts carrying imagery played both a structural and didactic role - large or small, they were systematically accumulated into the lexicon of beliefs embodied in the monument. Each piece, small or large carried the sensibility and vibration of the whole. Eddy's encounter with the fragments of these grand medieval decorative programs cemented his resolve to communicate the new message of his art through a cumulative arrangement of distinct images/ideas.

Fig. 85. Don Eddy, Imminent Desire/Distant Longing II, 1993 acrylic on canvas, 74 x 36 in. (in 3 panels) private collection.

The initial arrangement that he decided upon, and the one that he used for Celestial Expectations (Fig. 82) and a number of paintings that followed, is based on two horizontal panels stacked one above the other crowned by a third, arched panel. A standard spatial increment, usually one inch wide, is maintained between each panel to establish a boundary and to identify it as a distinct component of a cumulative visual/conceptual system. (Footnote 62) Though since the inception of the tripartite system, the arrangements have grown in number of panels and complexity, Eddy initiated this idea with the tall, stately format we encounter in Celestial Expectations. This early format has several sources. For one, it was inspired by the kind of Renaissance altarpiece used by Giovanni Bellini in his Madonna and Child Enthroned, (Accademia,Venice) that, in turn, derived its form from the arched openings of triumphal arches and portals. Eddy's organization of panels was also suggested by multi-paned, round headed windows of the sort that grace the front of his own loft and that he had seen in the Caribbean. As the new group of work was initiated, the choice of this particular format was deemed critical as a structural key for the viewer in the reading and understanding of the paintings. The suggestion of a portal or window, presented in synchronized increments that made up the painting, functioned like a poetic symbol of threshold into another reality. In contrast to the Albertian window that was intended as an analogy for the accurate representation of the physical laws of the natural world, Eddy's framework was meant to be understood as a window or portal into a metaphysical world. Each of the individual members or panels of the new paintings represents an image excerpted from the material sphere and organized by the artist into an artificial association that functions poetically and allegorically. The discrete images are chosen for their potential to allude to universals that belong, in the Jungian sense, to the collective consciousness of man. They are handled like the symbols and allegories that are woven into poetic verse. At this juncture, I would like to note a further link to Eddy's formative years, and especially to the impact of the teachings of Noam Chomsky upon Eddy. The connection is made by the interesting association that can be made between Chomsky's concept of innate pre-settings that order sensory data and Carl Jung's notion of universals held within the collective subconscious. (Footnote 63) The artist had, indeed, returned full circle to his starting points, only to find that they now resided in a different galaxy. As we have noted, the new framework for the paintings was developed to allow the discrete images - visual equivalents of literary vignettes - to function as the metaphysical vocabulary of visual or mute poetry. A painter's impulse to seek a poetic valence in his work is timeless. Analogies between painting and poetry attach themselves to the very beginnings of the history of the creative process, and had already been codified in ancient literature on the subject. "Ut pictura poesis" (as a picture so poetry) and its counterpart (as a poem so painting) were undoubtedly operative even before Aristotle made notes on the subject in the Poetics, and Horace had uttered his famous dictum; these ideas have crisscrossed the millennia right into the present. (Footnote 64) Closer to us in time, Magritte resonated the time-honored association in 20th century terms. "The act of painting is performed in order that poetry appear and not in order to reduce the world to a variety of its material aspects. Poetry does not forget the mystery of the world: it is not just a means of evasion nor food for the imagination, it is presence of mind." (Footnote 65) As Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque observes, 'We like Magritte' or 'We do not like Magritte' but "For Magritte, poetry was the description of the inspired thought, and the art of painting had the ability to describe that inspired thought, to make it appear openly, to reveal it with the help of elements taken from the visible world." (Footnote 66)

Familiar subject matter from preceding work found its way into Eddy's new pictorial format, reminding us that his images were consistently used in ways other than narrative. In the arched upper panel of Celestial Expectations, the vegetables, fruit, flowers and eggs of Dreamreader's Table gesture to each other, spelling the story of the cycles of gestation, birth, flowering and the harvest. (Fig. 84)

Fig. 84 Don Eddy, Dreamreader Table V; Celestial Expectations (detail, upper panel.)

The objects are set, like constellations, on an intense blue field that offers a densityequivalent to the night sky. The central horizontal fills the frame from edge to edge with the surface of sparkling water that plays a tension between the puzzle-games of brecciated marble and the secrets of profound depth of a sea unable to be pierced by sight alone. At the foundation of the tripartite panel one discovers a macro image of wild flowers and grass setting off sparks, like fireworks, to ignite the viewer's mind and soul. We are invited to replace glance with the penetrating vision of thought that drives towards the higher causal principals and to their impact upon matter through creative processes.

Fig. 85. Don Eddy, Imminent Desire/Distant Longing II, 1993 acrylic on canvas, 74 x 36 in. (in 3 panels) private collection.

With Immanent Desire/Distant Longing, the eye meets the triptych at a waterfall that cascades towards us and down, drawing attention to the 'glory' of morning glory flowers in whose palpable beauty the spirit is refreshed. (Fig. 85) As we follow the dramatic rush of water, this time back into the dense, silent woods we become aware that light is our guide. It draws the eye not only back but towards an ascent that meets a burst of light revealed by the course of mountainous screens of massive, peaked clouds as they yield position. The dark brooding underside of the cloudbanks, and the unbroken wall of woodlands relieved only by light, introduce an element of tension and foreboding that keeps us ever mindful of inevitable confrontations with fate and dark forces.

Fig. 86. Don Eddy, Limen, 1993 acrylic on linen, 68 x 40 in. (in 3 panels) private collection.

Like black lightening striking through the radiance of wild cherry blossoms in full bloom, the trunk of the tree in the central panel of Limen reverberates the Archangel Michael's symbolic division of damned and saved to the sky above. (Fig. 86) Fear is calmed by the promise of the tempered, nurturing sky, cast in the form of a hovering cloud that seeks to protect the sea's hard won tranquility. Last Judgements traditionally appeared in the lintels of medieval church portals (the symbolic threshold between the celestial and terrestrial domains); they were intended as emblems of justice and as admonitions towards just disposition. Limen, the term that gives the painting its title, is the threshold of a physiological or psychological response. In Eddy's painting the vocabulary of struggle, faith, thresholds and passage is asserted by nature's movements and reflected upon in the various mental, psychic and physical constructs of man. Light once again is the messenger.

Fig. 87. Don Eddy, Aqueous Lumina, 1993 acrylic on canvas, 74 x 50 in. (in 3 panels) Seavest Collection.

The title of Aqueous Lumina refers to the plural form of the term lumen (a measure, or unit of the flow of light) as a lumen is transformed by contact with surfaces of water. (Fig. 87) Water is featured throughout - flowing from a Hercules fountain, crashing as surf on rocks, and trickling from cupped hands. Fountains, as distinguished for example from wells, are a source for water bestowed in an artful way. 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 both light and water as illuminative entities. Though kin to the lessons discovered in the surface shine of polished chrome, glass, or silver, these images take the viewer further, by far, to the wonderment of nature and of man's glorification in it as observer, artificer, charge, and protector. Each panel, intense in its own right, is crafted to function in concert with the others (for example, through shared palette, the various aspects of water, etc.). Each is a focused representation of a forceful image, made more powerful by a dramatic cropping that insists the image be read as a symbol that stands for elemental, archetypal concepts. Each acts in concert with the others. The measure of success of this strategy of close physical, visual and thematic interaction of the three fields of the triptych upon each other is given in the dignified, commanding aspect of Aqueous Lumina.

Fig. 88. Don Eddy, Catena Aurea ( The Golden Chain), 1996 colored pencil on paper, 28 1/2 x 28 1/2 in., collection Richard and Monica Segal.

Catena Aurea ( The Golden Chain), addresses the mystical lexicon. (Fig. 88) Like the programs of the cathedrals it is intended as a summa - in this case, an ontological one of meditation on the chain of being. It is designed to direct our thought to states of being and 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 interlocks eternity and the points of the compass. The four elements (out of which, in various proportions, all matter was believed to have been composed) are represented. Some, like fire, are shown in their natural state. They are also present referentially, as physical properties - frozen, fluid, solid, or as a function of nature and man’s ability to make structures, to decorate. In the detail of a Gothic stone carving, a memento mori, the life cycle is referenced. And so on….

Fig. 89. Don Eddy, Oracle Bones, 1996 acrylic on canvas, 75 x 74 in. (in 7 panels), private collection

In Oracle Bones, the hovering sky of Limen, the ballet of delicate, hovering fuschia, two white doves, and the swells and foam of water meeting rocks, join in an embrace reflected in the arched vaults of a medieval portico. (Fig. 89) Oracle Bones is a celebration of existence in all of its forms, shapes, materials, time frames of the seasons and centuries. Like the ribcage of a being so long departed that it holds mysteries within it for the archaeologist/adventurer, the rib vaulted space is the central organizing agent of the painting. Its augural message of disclosure is located at its center in the arched window that frames and directs our view towards the light-filled opening whose simple, immutable, intangible energy seems, in an instant, to have more weight than the material sphere.

Fig. 90. Don Eddy, City of Refuge II, 1998 acrylic on wood panel, 18 x 30 in. (in 3 panels), private collection.

The City of Refuge II directs attention to compositional devices that are evident, once we look for them, in each of these masterfully crafted paintings. (Fig. 90) There is a thoughtful attention to patterns established by the rhythms of outlines, shapes, color accents, chiaroscuro effects and the like that imbues the diverse elements of all the paintings with a cadence allied to verse. In City of Refuge II, mirror images of a gothic stairwell frame the reflection of tree lined banks on the surface of a tranquil river. The linear rhythm lent by the trees and branches is echoed in the colonettes and ribs that follow the architectural elements in the gothic space. Each of the three panels is round headed; at approximately two thirds of the dimension of the central panel, the mirror image panels function like a refrain. We are caught by surprise in the recognition that floodlit openings do not lead out of the manmade space, and that the blue of the open sky that moves from bottom to top of the central panel is just a reflection in water that the eye can penetrate only minimally. The mirror imaging of the side panels augments this sensation. They become a foil as well for the grander rhythm shared between them and the central panel, in the sweep of the reflected tree tops that is continued in the grand flight of splayed steps that seem to join the space of nature and man. Mirroring and reflection return in the City of Refuge as primary agents, encasing us in the quietude of a luminous and lovely crystalline conundrum to ponder the harmonics of the spheres. The archetypal nature of Eddy's imagery of the '90s, and its 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. Limen, Aqueous Lumina, Oracle Bones and their cohorts 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 imagery, meant to function allegorically and symbolically, is not weighted towards specific, recognizable emblems or symbols, but is weighted towards our subconscious visionary and instinctive tendencies. To be sure, the viewer was always important to Eddy; depending upon his or her disposition the paintings could function like tests or honing tools of various aspects of perception. It is the case with this latest group of paintings that rather than offer solutions, they celebrate mysteries directing us, through the encounter, to our higher consciousness.

Fig. 91. Don Eddy, Dream Weaver, 1999 acrylic on wood, 18 x 38 in. (in 3 panels), private collection.

Water is an ever-present protagonist in the imagery of the paintings presently under discussion. While water is always endowed by the artist with spectacular tactile qualities, these qualities are also meant to stand for states of being - for example, agitation, peace, the sense of being cleansed, the strength of mutability. However, of all the natural elements that appear in the work, light has continued to assume a central if not the primary position. And well it may. Light, and fire, have served as the eternal symbols of inspiration, the inspired spirit, zeal, pursuit of higher causes, and, ultimately, of the causal principal of existence. In a most recent painting entitled Dream Weaver, Eddy paid homage to this agent that has provided the very fabric of his art. (Fig. 91) Dream Weaver is composed of three arched panels of equal dimensions that, from left to right, feature the snow covered branches of trees and shrubbery in Central Park, a spider web made magically visible by diamond-like droplets of moisture, and the sparkle of the light tipped leaves of Fall set off against the foil of a screen of dark branches. Arachne returns, tripping our Daydreamer into a Dream Weaver, who spins the magic of light with the cloth of nature's seasons and the silken threads of the mysterious, industrious spider that catch us in their thrall.

Fig. 92. Don Eddy, Evacuation of the Common Error, 1997-98 acrylic on canvas, 44 x 44 in. (in 5 panels), private collection.

The classical ruins set against an outcrop of rock at the center of Evacuation of the Common Error conjure thoughts of the fate of empires and human enterprise, and of the inevitable transformations imposed by time. (Fig. 92) The banks of the Arno, by Day and Night, surely allude to Michelangelo's stunning allegories of the passage of time in the Medici Tombs. The common error is vanity; the painting is a vanitas. The myth of permanence finds its reality in transience. Florence was Dante's city as well, and the constant flow of the Arno past its banks calls us to reflect upon the eternal cycles and struggles of the human spirit so deftly revealed in the great poet's epic, La Divina Comedia. As the optical richness and density of the imagery in the latest group of paintings declares its reality, it in turn becomes a divining rod, and the artist, the seer. From the earliest work to that of the present, Eddy’s canvases have been the most rarified sort of scratch sheets in service to an investigation into and meditation upon the meaning of 'grand design.'

May the artist in each of us find its outlet for expression, bring with it transformation and moments for the spirit to soar.

Ý

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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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