Don Eddy (born 1944) is a contemporary representational painter.Martin, Alvin. "Spaces of the Mind: New paintings by Don Eddy," Arts, February 1987, p. 22–3.Baker, Kenneth. "Don Eddy," Artforum, March 1972. Retrieved March 4, 2021. He gained recognition in American art around 1970 amid a group of artists that critics and dealers identified as Photorealists or Hyperrealists, based on their work's high degree of verisimilitude and use of photography as a resource material.Rosenberg, Harold. Review, "Sharp-Focus Realism," The New Yorker, February 5, 1972.Schjeldahl, Peter. "Realism—A Retreat to the Fundamentals?" The New York Times, December 24, 1972. Retrieved March 4, 2021.Chase, Linda, Nancy Foote and Ted McBurnett. "The Photo-Realists: 12 Interviews," Art in America, November–December 1972.Battcock, Gregory. Super Realism: A Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. Retrieved March 4, 2021. Critics such as Donald Kuspit (as well as Eddy himself) have resisted such labels as superficially focused on obvious aspects of his painting while ignoring its specific sociological and conceptual bases, dialectical relationship to abstraction, and metaphysical investigations into perception and being; Kuspit wrote: "Eddy is a kind of an alchemist … [his] art transmutes the profane into the sacred—transcendentalizes the base things of everyday reality so that they seem like sacred mysteries."Kuspit, Donald. Don Eddy: The Art of Paradox, New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002.Eddy, Don. "The Movement That Was Not," RH Art Magazine, 2012.Wallach, Amei. "Reflections of Things Not Seen: The Paintings of Don Eddy," Don Eddy: From Logic to Mystery, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Museum of Art, 2000. Eddy has worked in cycles, which treat various imagery from different formal and conceptual viewpoints, moving from detailed, formal images of automobile sections and storefront window displays in the 1970s to perceptually challenging mash-ups of still lifes and figurative/landscapes scenes in the 1980s to mysterious multi-panel paintings in his latter career.Raynor, Vivien. "Whitney Exhibit Looks Into the World of the Car," The New York Times, May 6, 1984, Sect. CN, page 11. Retrieved March 4, 2021.Raynor, Vivien. "The Window' in 20th-Century Works," The New York Times, January 2, 1987. Retrieved March 4, 2021. He lives in New York City with his wife, painter Leigh Behnke.Harrison, Helen A. "Art Reviews: 'Together Working,'" The New York Times, February 27, 2000. Retrieved November 8, 2019.Smithsonian American Archives of Art. "Don Eddy and Leigh Behnke Papers," Collection. Retrieved November 8, 2019.
Early life and career Eddy was born in Long Beach, California in 1944. In early adolescence, he worked at his father's auto body shop doing custom paint jobs, an experience that familiarized him with Southern California car culture, the airbrush as a painting tool, and working-class concern for craft—all factors in his later art.Urban, William and Robert Paschal. "Interview: Don Eddy," Airbrush Digest, July/August 1984, page 18.Johnson, Neil. "Don Eddy: Master of Reality," Airbrush Action 7, November–December 1991, page 10.Bonito, Virginia Ann. Don Eddy: The Resonance of Realism in the Art of Post War America, ArtRegister Press, 1999. He studied art history and fine arts at the University of Hawaiʻi (BFA, 1967; MFA, 1969), also working as a snapshot photographer for a tourist agency.Martin, Alvin. "Don Eddy: Image, Reflection, Dream," Don Eddy, New York: Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 1987. After exploring and rejecting the prevailing mode of abstract expressionist subjectivity, he was drawn to the more accessible work of Surrealist René Magritte and the commercialized realism of Pop artist James Rosenquist, both of which juxtaposed incongruous images in a single painting space.Gokduman, Safak Günes. "Don Eddy," Artist Modern, April, 2010.
After graduating, Eddy completed PhD coursework in art history at University of California, Santa Barbara while continuing to paint. By 1970, he had shifted from early mixed-media and figurative work and turned to car-culture imagery and the Paasche H airbrush from his youth (which he has used his entire career) in works focused on the nature of space in painting.Airbrush Digest. "Interview, Don Eddy," July/August 1984, Cover, pages 16–23, 58–9. He received his first widespread recognition through exhibitions such as "Sharp-Focus Realism" (Sidney Janis Gallery) and Documenta 5 (1972), "California Realist Painters" (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1973) and "Hyper-Realisme Americaine, Realism European" (Centre National d'Art Contemporain, 1974).Kramer, Hilton. "And Now...Pop Art: Phase II," The New York Times, January 16, 1972, Section D, page 19.Kurtz, Bruce. "Documenta 5: A Critical Preview," Arts Magazine, Summer 1972.Santa Barbara Museum of Art. California Realist Painters, Santa Barbara, California: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1973.Centre National d'Art Contemporain. Hyperrealistes Americains/Realistes Europeens, Paris: Centre National d'Art Contemporain, 1973. After moving to New York City in the early 1970s, he continued to appear in prominent surveys at the Whitney Museum and San Antonio Museum of Art, among others, while establishing a longtime relationship with New York dealer Nancy Hoffman, whose gallery has put on his solo exhibitions from 1974 to 2020.Whitney Museum of American Art. "Auto Icons", New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979.San Antonio Museum. Real, Really Real, Super Real, San Antonio, TX: San Antonio Museum Association, 1981. Retrieved March 9, 2021.Shere, Charles. "An impressive show of airbrush painting," The Oakland Tribune, February 28, 1982.Graves, David C. Don Eddy: An Event of Consciousness, New York: Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 2019.
Process Eddy paints using a systematic, painstaking process he developed early in his career, exploiting what he calls his "obsessive-compulsive" temperament.Lockridge, Larry. "The Changes of Don Eddy," Image, February 2001, pages 29–37. He begins with multiple photographs recording a maximum of detailed visual information.Carr, Gerald. "Don Eddy," Arts Magazine, December 1983. After selecting a "master image", he projects it onto a canvas and maps out his composition. He then lays down three sequences of transparent underpainting in tiny (1/16") layered airbrush circles of different value: the first, in phthalocyanine green, supplies detailed image information and value structure; a burnt sienna layer distinguishes warm from cool regions and amplifies the darks; and a dioxazine purple layer further specifies the warms and cools.Don Eddy website. The Process. Retrieved March 11, 2021. In the final stage, he airbrushes the full range of local colors in the same manner (often 15–25 layers), based on the chromatic structure of the underpainting rather than the actual objects photographed.Museu Europeu d'Art Modern. "Don Eddy and American Hyperrealism," Barcelona: Museu Europeu d'Art Modern, 2014. He has described the result as a kind of illusion—small, abstract circles that resolve into highly representational images at a distance.
Work and reception Eddy's work has been informed by wide-ranging, sometimes contradictory influences: old masters (e.g., van Eyck and Vermeer), Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist color, the analytical cubism of Braque and Picasso, Hans Hofmann, Conceptual and Minimalist critiques of Abstract Expressionism, and Pop art. His art stakes out paradoxical positions to both realism and abstraction, investigated in the context of recognizable, accessible imagery.Criqui, Jean-Pierre. "Locus Focus: 'Hyperrealisms,'" Artforum, January 1976. Retrieved March 4, 2021. It rejects abstract art, yet like that work, emphasizes surface and pictorial issues over imagery according to writer William Dyckes: "[Eddy] is essentially a field painter … concerned with the interactions of shapes and colors rather than with the representation of specific imagery in space."Dyckes, William. "The Photo as Subject," in Super Realism: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock (ed.), New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. page 155. Likewise, it seems to value photographic verisimilitude, yet in fact, exceeds the camera and human eye by heightening painting attributes such as optical brilliance, tactile highlighting and multiple perspectives.Johnson, Ken. "Realism, Admittedly Slippery, Explores What Can and Can't Be Seen," The New York Times, December 19, 2003, page E40. Retrieved March 4, 2021.Patton, Phil. "Super Realism: A Critical Anthology," Artforum, Summer 2003. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
Early painting cycles (1970–1989) In the early 1970s, Eddy painted several largely formal cycles involving automobiles.Grellis, Charles. "Art Around the Automobile," Road and Track, 1972. The first captured the reflective possibilities of chrome and high-gloss paint in large, deadpan, highly detailed images of tightly framed bumpers, headlights, grills, wheel hubs and car bodies, which critics suggest transformed ordinary things into animate, uncanny presences and objects of contemplation beyond function (e.g., Bumper Section XIII or Ford—H & W, both 1970).Mezzatesta, Michael. "Foreword," Don Eddy: From Logic to Mystery, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Museum of Art, 2000. According to critic Amei Wallach "they juxtapose an exuberant baroque abstraction with a modernist geometry that suggests the hyperpurity of Charles Sheeler and the American precisionists." In the "Private Parking" series (1971), Eddy depicted cars seen through chain-link fences hung with signage, using the crisscrossing patterns and abstract shapes to intensify contradictions between illusionism and the single-plane picture surface.Boice, Bruce. "John Salt," Artforum, Summer 1973. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
In subsequent cycles, Eddy dissolved the corporeality and decipherability of his images by focusing on windows—initially car showrooms (the "Showroom" works, 1971–2), and later, kitchenware and shoe storefronts yielding more chaotic compositions (e.g., Pots and Pans, 1972; New Shoes for H., 1973).Janson, H.W. History of Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. The window surfaces—both transparent and reflective—enabled him to focus simultaneously on two planes, something impossible in normal vision.Schwendener, Martha. "Breaking with Tradition, Over and Over," The New York Times, February 22, 2013. Retrieved March 4, 2021. The clash of recognizable forms, hard-edged shapes, light and cityscape resulted in what art historian Alvin Martin called "highly veristic adaptations of Cubist theory." Eddy pushed this dissolution to a maximum in late-1970s paintings depicting silverware (and later, crystal) displays on stacked glass and mirrored shelves, which he set up in his studio to explore light refraction.Russell, John. "David Stoltz/Don Eddy," The New York Times, November 19, 1976, page 15. Retrieved March 4, 2021.Raynor, Vivien. "Realism Magnified at Storrs, The New York Times, April 1, 1979, Section CN, Page 112. Retrieved March 4, 2021. Critics described that cycle—stripped to an austere palette of icy blues and silvers—as inducing a "perceptual overload"Harrison, Helen A. "Focusing in on Super-Realism," The New York Times, April 28, 1991, Sect. 12LI, page 11. Retrieved March 4, 2021. where dazzling optical play and complexity reduced space and imagery to nearly unrecognizable abstract patterns (e.g., Silverware V for S, 1977; G-I, 1978).Neff, John Hallmark. "Painting and Perception: Don Eddy," Arts, December 1979.