Flower Power

 

Leonard Edmondson

  1916 - 2002 (biography)

1967  

mixed technique color intaglio 

17 1/8 x 22 1/4" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

18 of 75  

titled, lower center margin 

illustrated as plate 38 in Leonard Edmondson: Art of Discovery; also illustrated as pate 1 in Etching by Leonard Edmondson 

heavy ivory wove 

published 

artist 

JESH101 

$1,600.00 

According to David Acton in his essay "The Prints of Leonard Edmondson,” the artist began to shape his intaglio plates in the mid-1960s by sawing them into jagged shapes before working their surfaces. Flower Power is printed from two such sawn irregular shaped intaglio plates. Edmondson used softground to add a variety of textures to his plate including Asian coins and medals which he inked separately, isolating each area of texture and color.

Launching his distinctive style from the 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 shapes from his physical 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."

A note on the condition of the work: This intaglio exhibits faint mat burn in the left and right margins (see image), but due to the deeply embossed textures impressed into the paper by Edmondson's technique, removal is difficult without affecting the print's intentional three-dimensionality. This condition was taken into account when pricing the work.