| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Calgary-born painter Greg Edmonson draws upon his Northern European heritage and fascination with history, especially that of Russia, to produce sometimes giant paintings that hide human faces (chiaroscuro works depicting characters who are either leaving the shadows of memory or falling into them), or reveal the land and sky in sometimes cataclysmic subjects (“Crash #1,” for instance, which looks like the Hindenburg in mid-immolation). His series Soviet Pangaea incorporates portraits with geography; its name alludes to two once-powerful unions that have disintegrated beyond any recomposition.
Describing his own work, Edmonson writes, “As people get older, their self is a mirror of a continuously changing form [like] one’s various states of mind. Metamorphosis, and not some kind static idealism, rules…. The way I use shadows over a face is not unlike how time redefines and changes things. The transitions may be as subtle or as dramatic.”
Edmonson earned his B.F.A. at the University of Calgary (1983) and his M.F.A. at the University of Alberta (1985), before studying at the Banff School of Fine Arts (1985 – 1986). A range of corporate, public, and private collections house his paintings, including those of the Glenbow Museum, the Canada Council Art Bank, Global Affairs Canada, and Microsoft. Edmonson has mounted more than a dozen solo exhibitions, including Permutations and Mutations at Lethbridge’s Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Circumfigurabile at L’Associazione Culturale Crossing in Portogruaro, Italy, and New Paintings at Vancouver’s Atelier Gallery. He has received several grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council. |