Nearly five years ago, within the span of a year, painter Wendy V. Edwards lost her father to Covid and welcomed her first grandchild. “I was dealing with the death, but at the same time,” she says, “having a grandson is such a wonderful gift. It’s like a new life, new world.” The experience jolted her into creating a series of largescale paintings that explore the cycle of life and death. Poking around her bookshelf at home, she came across a midwifery textbook from the 1840s. The illustrations of embryo and fetus development struck her both as morbid and profound, so she used them as source imagery for her paintings. “My work is really very colorful and vibrant, and people often view it as being positive, kind of upbeat,” Edwards says. “But in reality, I’m dealing with some more serious issues as I get older.” These paintings, and several from a past series inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s late works, are part of Edwards’s new solo exhibition, opening this month at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Handy, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches.
Edwards views painting as a primarily physical, intuitive act. She works on six-foot-tall canvases, in part, she says, because “it just feels good to stretch my body” while painting. As a high school student, she was trained by the notable Washington, D.C.-based painter Sam Gilliam, who used vibrant colors to saturate room-sized draped linen substrates. Edwards, though, uses color to add or subtract layers of oil paint until the composition is a perfectly balanced cacophony of color. “It’s just innate,” she says. “I know about color. I know what color I need to use.”
