Teeming Desert

Leonard Edmondson

Launching his distinctive style from abstract surrealism of Paul Klee and the expressionism of Hans Hofmann, Los Angeles artist Leonard Edmondson's aesthetic imagery invokes ‘almost remembered' forms, feelings and spaces in his paintings, watercolors, etchings and screenprints.

Edmondson transforms the opaque, flat surfaces that defined the serigraphs of the WPA era into a transparent composition, a microcosm of life forms that exist in a hostile, apparently lifeless, environment, describing them with his own visual vocabulary.

Leonard Edmondson wrote: "This vocabulary manifests itself in a dynamic structure where color responds to the size and position of shapes, and reinforces the intent of the composition. Lines close to make shapes that occupy shallow space. I am equally concerned with what I want to say and the formal values I use to say it. My painting is not art of rebellion but one of discovery and sharing. I have found satisfaction in the spontaneous, often compulsive, act of drawing and painting."