By Jake Fain
Staff Writer
A former Union professor and his daughter are displaying their first collaboration of paintings at Union University until Nov. 13.
Larry and Beth Edwards’ artwork debuted Oct. 9 in the gallery in the Penick Academic Complex.
Beth Edwards is a painting instructor at the University of Memphis. Larry Edwards first taught art at Union from 1957 to 1958.
Characters in the paintings are the commonality between the two artists’ works. Contrasts show up in the differences in tone.
Each piece was chosen to complement the other’s work.
Larry Edwards’ pieces show humanoid characters with animal heads in dark settings to convey a sense of his impression of common people’s behavior and appearance. Edwards’s pieces are also done in a multimedia style.
Beth Edwards has been painting for 35 years. In high school, she contemplated a career in law, but after a personal crisis, Edwards said she turned to art to express her emotions.
“If I wasn’t in class then I was constantly drawing and painting everything I could,” Edwards said. “I immersed myself into art to survive.”
Her work features pleasant settings with a bright message, featuring vintage dolls in place of humans.
“The characters are consciously trying to be happy,” Beth Edwards said. “They are appreciating the beauty of everything around them. We both have these somewhat recurring casts in our work.”
The main difference between her work and her father’s, she said, is in the overall mood.
“My work is much brighter while my father’s takes on a much more ominous and dark nature,” she said.
Beth Edwards said she searched antique stores for the perfect figures to use in her pieces. She also photographed the interiors of homes and printed famous works of art to include in the paintings.
She would then paint the doll she felt was appropriate for the scene using the interior photographs as a reference for a setting. She then painted portions of the works she printed off, treating them as decorative pieces in the homes of the dolls.
Larry Edwards, who grew up in a small town in Mississippi, is retired art professor. He began by painting landscapes, he said.
“I don’t know how, in such an absolute absence of true art, that I felt this, but I always just knew that I would become an artist,” Larry Edwards said.
Edwards taught art for a number of universities, the first of which was Union University from 1957 to 1958.
Edwards then moved to Alabama where he taught at Athens State University until 1965. After leaving for Boone, N.C., Edwards taught at the Appalachian State University until 1975 and spent a small two year stint teaching art for Pennsylvania State University.
Edwards’ final location to teach art was at the University of Memphis for 20 years until he retired in 1997.
Edwards began with abstract painting in the late 1950s and early ‘60s but soon hit a creative wall.
“It just didn’t move me anymore,” he said. “Suddenly I was struck with a fascination for landscapes. The moods and motions of nature just struck me.”
Edwards said he hit another creative wall 20 years later, but then realized his work lacked portrayals of people.
“I had a few tiny beings inhabiting my landscapes, and I wondered why I had chosen to avoid them,” Edwards said. “Then I realized I had been painting personal Edens for myself to mentally retreat to due to my disappointment with reality.”
It was at that time that he began constructing the type of pieces on display with his daughter’s work, he said.
