Made in U.S.A.

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 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."

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. "Made in U.S.A." is printed from two such sawn irregular shaped intaglio plates. Edmondson used softground and collagraphy to add a variety of textures to his plates.