Diane Edison: Drawings

During January and February the George Adams Gallery will present recent drawings by Diane Edison.  The exhibition, featuring ten works on paper, originated at the Art Gallery of the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, and is accompanied by a full-color catalogue.

Edison's drawings are closely observed portraits and self-portraits rendered in pastel or colored pencil. For example, in the drawing Self-Portrait in a Red Shirt, the artist depicts herself nearly life-scale; clad in a red tank top, she turns towards the viewer with a stance that is at once reserved and defiantly open.  In the related piece, Rebecca Has a Red Shirt Too, a portrait of the artist's daughter, light and shadow play off the young girl's face yielding a tentative expression of self-assuredness.

Over the years Edison has frequently used herself as a subject revealing a personal history through close self-examination. In Mommy, A Sight for Sore Eyes, 2002, for example, the artist drawn in profile is offset by her own reflection in a mirror fragment.  Similarly, in the color pencil drawing When I am Old, I Shall Wear Purple, 2001, Edison renders her face in uncompromising detail, framed by her distinctive dreadlocks.

In a new drawing titled Locks, 2002, Edison undermines traditional notions of portraiture by depicting the hair on the back of her head. A curtain of thickly twined hair fills the composition, at once intimately real and abstract.  As Robin Dana writes in the catalogue essay, "Edison's long distinctive locks become a symbol of time, of process, and of change."

Diane Edison was born in 1950 in Piscataway, New Jersey.  She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1976 and her MFA from the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania in 1986.  Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions, including "Figure/Disfigure," University of Rhode Island, Kingston;  "New Realism for a New Millennium," Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York; and "The Art of Collecting," Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI. Edison currently teaches at the University of Georgia, Athens. This is her third solo exhibition with George Adams Gallery.


Exhibition Checklist


1. A Thought, 2002
colored pencil on paper
44 x 30 inches
DEd 28

2. Mom at 75, 1995
colored pencil on paper
44 x 30 inches
DEd 16

3. Mommy, A Sight for Sore Eyes, 2001-2002
colored pencil on paper
44 x 30 inches
DEd 25

4. Locks, 2002
colored pencil on paper
44 x 30 inches
DEd 27

5. Self-Portrait at 50, 2001
colored pencil on black paper
44 1/4 x 30 inches
DEd 23

6. Rebecca Has a Red Shirt Too, 2002
pastel on paper
30 x 22 inches
DEd 26

7. Untitled (Full-Face Frontal), 2002
pastel on paper
44 x 30 inches
DEd 30

8. Self-Portrait in a Red Shirt, 2002
colored pencil on paper
44 x 30 inches
DEd 29

9. Self Portrait with Glasses, 1997
colored pencil on paper
44 x 30 inches
DEd 15