Scorpius

Leonard Edmondson

The knowledge he gained in his pre-war years at Los Angeles City College and the University of California, Berkeley, taking courses in painting and drawing, strengthened Leonard Edmondson’s understanding of composition on the whole, and in “Scorpius” we can see Leonard Edmondson’s keen sense of color, form, and texture, like a choreographed dance, play out on the plate. The eye does not necessarily search out recognizable forms; rather, a pleasing balance and energy emerges from the sheet, inviting contemplation rather than waiting for a narrative.

Scorpius is a constellation located in the Southern celestial hemisphere and is one of 48 constellations identified by Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the second century. Its astrological symbol is the scorpion that killed the mythical hunter Orion and appears to be pursuing him in the heavens.

Though he started as a figurative artist and had begun establishing a following for his paintings, Leonard Edmondson discovered an interest in non-representational Abstraction in the early 1950s. As well, he found a love of intaglio printmaking, making his first etching in 1951 in a class taught by Ernest Freed. This proved to be a pivotal and important change for the California-based artist.

As the appreciation of abstraction’s possibility rose within the art world, so too did the appreciation for those artists whose work began in what was already accepted as proper art techniques and genres, who then applied that information to the exploratory, undefined horizon of non-representational imagery and experimental mediums.