Artist Statement
Growing up in southern California I could not get enough of the mountains, ocean, and desert—places of wonder for me. During the years of my training in painting and printmaking in the 1960’s, I was attracted by the abstraction in art that was popular at the time. In the years that followed my schooling, I worked to wed some of what I had learned of art-making with the optical delight I have always taken in the world around me. After moving to Tennessee early in the 1970’s I grew to love the nearby forested Appalachian Mountains which increasingly became my favored subject for my art.
My oil painting process involves both the use of brushes to build up the surface with color, and the use of rags to rub off small, fingerprint-size areas to expose the more intense color of my patchwork underpainting. This adding and subtracting method enables me to suggest something of the complexity, mystery, and richness of the natural subjects which I am drawn to paint. I like to think of the source of the materials used as from the earth, and the painting process as one of transforming those materials into images of that earth. I would wish that the dominant impression left on the viewer would be the beauty and wonder of the creation.
~Edward Kellogg
“The rocks in Edward Kellogg’s paintings came before us and afterward they will remain…For Kellogg this is not a somber truth, but instead a source of vitality, of meaning and of awe, that drives him to these subjects, and then to canvases he has prepared for them. No move, no shape, no color, no space permit entrance for a heaviness of spirit. There is far too much luster in his work for that.”
“These paintings of Edward Kellogg’s reflect the passages of time as much as they do the energy of a painter who cannot get enough of the world’s optical delights. The artist is at home in his time and in his place, and can therefore absorb life more fully, his and what he has observed. Before us are his testimonies, in oil on canvas. What he has seen and we can see, rocks, trees, water and colors in the dark.”
Rob Colvin, New York, NY