About Edith Beatty
Artist Statement
Art enables me to time travel through my life exhuming buried moments, taking advantage of the dislocation to portray serenity, restoration, and joy. Memoir. The justice and hope I seek in life.
Constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing memory and emotion unveil both disequilibrium and wonder. I use these remnants of the past to replicate that process with my media, building layers, revealing, concealing, adding, subtracting work on the surface. The seasons have recently become my metronome. Seasons of the year, seasons of my life, seasons of humanity.
I work with encaustic and oil paints, cold wax, inks, and dyes on paper, fiber, and wood panels. Blues dominate my palette, gestures are curvilinear, luminosity always critical. Multiple layers create structure and terrain to reveal an archeology of intention and process. I work often on squares, defying an a priori sense of composition, and on narrow, linear pieces suggesting landscape and figure, always in search of experiencing my place and purpose on this earth. My media of choice allow ample time for the work to set and cure, necessary for me to engage in the development of the piece, to excavate, build, and resolve its story and integrity.
Inspired by many masters from earlier periods - Matisse, Klee, O’Keeffe, Frankenthaler, Rothko, Johns, Marden among them - I abstract events, people, and places that have influenced my life. One may experience my work through vision and touch to discover the balanced asymmetry I portray. Materiality, sensuality, and storytelling inhabit my work.
Bio
Edith Beatty maintains a studio in the village of Waterbury, Vermont. An artist most all of her life, she concentrates now on painting with oil and wax, expanding her array of surfaces, pigments, and design.
Edie was born in Boston and has lived predominantly in the Northeast. She earned a Doctorate in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from Indiana University, and enjoyed an extensive career designing and leading programs to promote social justice and equity. She now shifts her focus to making works of art that convey that same struggle and hope.
Continuing her lifelong quest for learning through relationships and dialog with artists, cadres, and friends, Edie is part of the Yellow Chair Salon based in New York City, a proud member of New England Wax, and more informally, two exhibiting groups - Wax Women and BADASS Painters. She has studied with fiber, design, and encaustic artists over a period of more than 30 years, and has completed residencies and master classes at Haystack School of Craft, Crow Barn, Fuller Craft Museum, Schoodic Institute, Maine Coast Encaustic Retreat, and Truro Center for the Arts. She has shown her work through curated and juried shows throughout Vermont, New England, and nationally. Her work showed spring and summer of 2023 at M David & Co Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Cove Street Arts in Portland, ME, Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester VT, and the juried show at the 16th International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown, MA. Fall and winter pieces were exhibited at Axels Gallery and the Current. Now in 2024 her work hangs in the Southern Vermont Arts Center, and the Kathryn Schwartz Gallery in Cambridge MA.
Edie lives with her husband, nestled into the Green Mountains of Vermont. There they enjoy inspiring views of the mountains, woods, and continual shifts in skies and weather patterns. When not painting, she cycles, kayaks, travels, cooks, and practices yoga and meditation.