“I want to produce work with integrity.” - So said a 26 year old me in a brochure for an art exhibition that I participated in with Daimler Chrysler Aerospace in Ottobrunn, Germany in 1999. Perhaps my statement of artistic intent was rather over simplistic and bashful, but the spirit of how I produce art - that is, my honest enquiry into painting - has been integral part of me over the years.
When I created my first website in 2011 I called it eddify.com. It was a name that I had toyed with for several years as wanted a website with a short and catchy URL address. ‘Eddify’ reflected both my diminutive name Eddie (or Eddy, if you like), and it also resembled the word edify which means to spiritually uplift. For a brief period I even signed my work with the name ‘Eddify’.
In 2018 I rebranded and updated the website, changing the name to edmundpalao.com so as to avoid confusion with who I am. My mission in producing edifying work, however, continues to be a central tenet of my artistic practice. In many of my blogs I emphasise the experience of ‘being there’ when painting places, especially outdoors. It usually invokes a sense of serenity, something experienced by all artists when creating work. Much of my formative work featured typically serene subjects such as local woodlands and the River Thames.
Wheelie Bins (Springfield Park) 2019 acrylic on board 30 x 40cm
The relationship between environment and painter can also be a struggle. Some of my recent paintings have included themes such as waste bins residing in urban settings. Wheelie Bins (Springfield Park) is an example of maintaining an honesty in conventional painting whilst depicting a subject matter that could be considered ironic, or even ugly. For me, objects like wheelie bins are ubiquitous symbols of contemporary life and have a bleak and understated charm of their own which can make for a compelling subject matter.
Dereliction and Snow 2013 acrylic on card 7 x 11 inches
Cityscapes are often associated another ubiquitous urban symbol: graffiti. A handful of paintings I have made over the years have featured the enigmatic scrawl of graffiti in landscapes. Dereliction and Snow depicts a place where a graffitied Donald Duck angrily invades the snowy remains of a brick hut along an abandoned railway line. When painting this scene I felt (in addition to the icy winter outdoors) a sense of trepidation and danger of being in a secluded place in a derelict environment. The feeling was coupled with an odd sense of what I could only describe as relief that another human being (a graffitist) had been there before me to brave the seclusion and create this rather enigmatic, if sarcastic, depiction of a famous Disney character. I had to overcome anxiety and cold to concentrate on painting the scene, where a combination of disparate elements ultimately came together as a complete experience: the ghostly past of the railway encroached by nature, the ever changing signs of graffiti by a different generation of people, and the seasonal roll of a winter’s afternoon.
In today's virtual onslaught of information where anything can be presented as truth (especially in the arts and culture world where iconoclasm and reductionism are acknowledged as central planks of the avant garde), it can be challenging to have an artistic statement that chooses to 're-bunk' rather than debunk. For me, integrity is about searching for truth, in a real and spiritual way. Painting allows me to connect to with the edifying in life.