Bruce Edman, Artist
My work depicts three of the main interests that drive my art practice: process, pattern and materials. Further, this reflects my exploration of the territory between the materiality of painting, landscape, and postmodern art.
In my work I develop semi-translucent surfaces, which reveal previous layers and leave a sort of archeological record of the process used and the patterns developed. As I paint I use the results of the previous layer to guide the next layer; I use each layer to infer something about the next one without a specific overall intent or goal in mind.
My background in systems theory creates an interest in forms that abstract very fundamental natural patterns. Thus patterns showing entropy, recursion, self-reference, and a curiosity in spontaneous structure can be seen in the work.
My works are landscapes in the sense that they are tied to what I perceive to be phenomena occurring in nature. It is within the landscape tradition that I focus on materials and the materiality of painting. A further aim of my work is to position the materiality of abstract painting as a counter discourse to postmodernism’s privileging of the political and the linguistic.
