Richard Edwards - The Heart of Darkness: Representations of Nature

Richard Edwards

Exhibition runs: October 22nd to November 12th, 2010
Opening: October 22nd, 7 - 10pm
UAS Main Space Gallery
319 - 10th avenue, SW, use alley entrance

...Richard Edwards is well-know to many ACAD graduates as a long-standing teacher of studio painting. He was born in a small mining village in South Wales and studied at Cardiff College of Art, Wales and Hornsey College of Art in London. In 1972 he left England to live in Canada. His works are in corporate, government, museum and university collections in Canada and Europe.

The Heart of Darkness...representations of nature...is an exhibition of fifteen new painted constructions and one previously unexhibited work.



-Gail Scheuring, The Heart of Darkness...Representations of Nature...Richard Edwards New Vocabulary
in Landscape Painting.

Richard Edwards is an artist whose practice has had an on-going dialogue between adversity, memory, and landscape. His three dimensional paintings are created from digital photographic images and cardboard painted constructions encased in plexi-glass. They house snapshot scenes of Edwards’ influences and childhood memories. His past series of works showcase images of water systems, ships, landscapes, heavy industry and expeditions which have been reoccurring themes in Edwards’ expansive art career.

Edwards’ current series offers a departure from his childhood memories of living in Wales into a reflection of the Canadian landscape and the notion of traditional painting. This series, The Heart of Darkness...Representations of Nature..., gives a fresh approach to the tradition of landscape painting. The exhibition title is derived from the novella of the same name, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Edwards states that the underlying theme of Conrad’s book is an investigation of
self. Edwards contemplates the nature of landscape painting and its departure from traditions into new painterly forms. This series of fifteen tableaux constructions depicts scenes that reference Canadian landscape painting in a new and innovative way. Models, trees, sand and rocks are carefully placed inside a plexi-glass cube creating a tableau which removes the cliché of picturesque, plein air landscape painting in favour of displaying the imagery in three dimensions. Even though these paintings share three dimensional qualities of sculpture, they are best viewed in one hundred eighty degrees, which presents the work as having two dimensional compositional elements similar to a painting.

In this series, Edwards’ works further evoke allusions to famous artists through subtle references. For instance, a lonely birch bark canoe sits in a river system void of human presence. When applied to Edwards’ work, this could be a pastoral reference to Tom Thomson and the traditions of landscape painting, or as a macabre invocation of the mystery surrounding the demise of one of Canada’s early landscape artists.

The canoe also evokes the idea of exploration, another thread common in Edwards’ art. Early Canadian Palliser expedition explorers utilized the canoe to gather information on the Canadian landscape for colonial settlement. This concept parallels the exploration of the Congo in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.

Situated in the rear of the case, Edwards’ landscapes offers the inclusion of a mirror, which is a metaphoric symbol of personal reflection towards landscape painting and his personal ties to the land. After witnessing the environmental destruction of water systems through the result of coal industry, Edwards went through a period of self reflection which served as a catalyst for an earlier art series and eventually influenced his decision to immigrate to Canada.