Writing this post has been an incredible challenge for me, not only because of the admiration I feel for this artist, but also because it is the first time that I write in Spanish and English.
I don't remember the moment when I first saw an Edward Povey painting, but I do believe that everything happens for something. Reading about him and his work, it is not by chance that it came just at this moment in my life.
Edward does not feel comfortable with the traditional titles, those that little by little are falling out from me, sometimes producing calm and another abyss. His painting comes from internal ideas, those that lately I have stopped avoiding and sometimes I walk thru with fear, but with the intention that my gaze, like his, be as honest as possible.
For some time I have also avoided television, radio and newspapers, even human company. This pandemic has connected me with my emotional memory, the one that Edward considers the source material for his paintings. Perhaps that is why when I contemplate them they pierce my soul.
I contacted Edward for asking him to let me write about them and he generously agreed and provided me with this article from PROVK magazine. I recommend you to read it because it is very interesting. I do not want to leave here more than a brushstroke of what is said in it, to introduce you to this unique artist and thinker.
When asked about his artistic style, Edward tells uses Cubist perspective from pre-Renaissance religious altarpieces in which tabletops and floors are brought flat to the surface of the canvas, as if the viewer were looking directly down upon them, mixed perspectives of Paul Cezanne’s Modern Cubism.
He talks about the realism of his paintings as an apparent photorealistic lie, deception for the human eye, which is not actually able to see, for example, the translucency of human flesh that it deliberately shows in the scenes.
One of my favorite parts is the one in which he describes the complex process of construction of his paintings, which begins only with words, which he collects in his study journals. Then he goes on to his work drawings and later to physical settings, which represent the scene with all the details and with living human figures, which are photographed as many times as necessary until the emotional state, that the author wants to convey, is captured.
His current foundation palette is based on Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna Altarpiece, (1505–1507), in which he used a Verdaccio grey-green undertone which determines all the neutral areas of my paintings, but Edward overlays several colored transparent layers on top of that foundation.
Of everything I read the best, without a doubt, are his words about his source material:
“My early experiences caused me to value my imagination as the only place where I was free of restraint, and imagination became my closest friend and the pith of my career.”
But what I would like to share with you in this post is what I feel when I admire his paintings and I am going to leave you two examples here:
I get into my car, I am finally alone, I feel some relief. My tears run down my cheeks alone, no one has given way to them, but they join my scene almost as a reflex action of the unprecedented emptiness that I perceive in my heart. I did not know that the soul could hurt. They all seem like characters from a nightmare from which I want to wake up. Everything stayed the way I left it, glasses, cups, plates ... I lie down and the pain comes back, this time I won't be able to bear it, I hug myself and try, I try again ... but the scream remains drowned in my throat. Without you, this world is no longer real.
Since you left, I am living between two worlds, two completely opposite worlds. Both girls look at me without fear, that is why I sense that they are achieving it, by leaps and bounds they abandon this, that of nonsense, in which nothing is what it seems, the one that makes fun of us in front of our noses, that of the attachments, the hypocrisy and the lies… From his throat the most authentic sprouts upwards, like the scream that I am still choking on. Without you, this world is no longer real.
“My paintings are a child’s diorama built from confessions and lies, giving society one small and fearful eyehole on the complex human life experience.” Edward Povey
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