Artist Simon Edwards spent his childhood in the countryside of the South Island, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 1997. Through layers of oil paint and ink vigorously rubbed, brushed and glazed, he conjures dark mountain spaces and lakes under looming skies that feel familiar to us all.
Edwards continues to work and live in Christchurch and is represented in many national collections, including the Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. In 2005 he won the “People’s Choice Award” in the Anthony Harper Art Prize and in 2006 the first prize in Landscape in the Parklane Art Awards.
Simon Edwards' recent works on aluminium are marvelous atmospheric paintings of the imagination. They are of no specific place. In preparatory works he collages views of cloud ridgelines, snow ice and river- often from photos taken whilst walking in the interior. He also sketches en plein air, relentlessly gathering, honing, and reworking his observations in the field before committing to the majesty and artifice of a new painting.
His works all extend beyond the representational, regionalist and realist genres and instead become studies of the sublime and the mythological - places which we seem to know so well, yet can't quite identify or lay claim to. They are at once familiar yet mystical, somewhat like the New Zealand landscape itself. His works allow us to enter and wander within the colour, depth and form of this unaccustomed and yet known ‘landscape’. Our analytical minds disengage and we are taken by our senses into an uplifting and awe inspiring world. It is a world ‘beyond’.
Although one can be reminded of Romantic painters such as Turner and Constable when viewing his work, Edwards interestingly identifies as a modernist painter, stating:
“The work places itself somewhere between a modernistic reliance of the essential qualities (of the materials and the methods of painting) and an awareness of the traditional forms of the landscape…the work becomes a result of what is happening on the surface at the time and building on chance effects that present themselves, contributing to a sense of space distance and movement."
Simon Edward's exhibition, Borderlands at The Central has been published in a lavishly illustrated catalogue, featuring an essay from Dr. Warren Feeny.