Dudley Edwards: A Sixties artist popping back home

FOR a renowned artist whose works have been owned by such notable, and diverse, figures as Sir Paul McCartney, David Bailey and Lord Sugar, it's somewhat surprising that Dudley Edwards' forthcoming exhibition at Dean Clough is his first in his hometown.

But Edwards, who found fame with the Pop Art collective BEV during the swinging 60s, is merely happy to have the opportunity to display his vibrant paintings in such grand surroundings.

"I've always wanted to have a show at Dean Clough because Halifax is my home town and it just so happens to be my first one-man exhibition, so it's doubly exciting."

His exhibition, on show at the Crossley Gallery until March 8, features 36 paintings, drawings and sketches.

"Although it's largely figurative, there's a lot of geometry involved and I've tried to find a happy marriage between the two of them," he says.

Although Edwards is primarily known for his colour-saturated Pop Art, his latest paintings are something of a departure from this, blending his artistic skills with geometry and esoteric symbolism.

"The only hangover from that earlier period I would say are the strong colours.

"The Sixties stuff was more decorative whereas my recent work uses figures to hang the colours and shapes on, while others have an added symbolism."

The juxtaposition of colours in Edwards' work and the deliberate, geometric angles are borne out of his deep fascination with the relationship between art and the natural world.

"I've been influenced by the ideas of the great Italian thinkers like Leonardo Fibonacci who said that divine geometry was behind all things. In other words, you can look at a tree which might seem unremarkable but you can predict where every single branch will be, and I like the idea of that naturalness," he explains.

"Leonardo Da Vinci used a lot of geometry in his work but you don't see the scaffolding when you're looking at the building, and that's why he's a genius."

Edwards craved to be an artist for as long as he can remember and studied at the Bradford College of Art, before heading down to London in the mid-Sixties where he formed the Pop Art collective with Doug Binder, founding curator at Dean Clough.

Their aim was "to bring joy and colour to the streets" which they did by turning everything from furniture to cars into psychedelic works of art.

After a decade living in the South, Edwards returned North and now lives in the serene surroundings of Stockeld Park, near Wetherby, with his wife Madeleine, a textile artist, where he concentrates on producing his own canvases.

"In terms of aesthetics, beauty and composition, I've spent years studying the works of the group of painters who lived in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, people like Matisse, Picasso and Degas – they're my heroes.

"I try and soak up as much as I can without plagarising their work and hope it comes through into my own," he says.

"For me, painting reached its zenith with those great artists and it's up to us to go back and pick up the baton, because I think we've lost the way with conceptual art.

"I don't have much time for the so-called Brit pack artists and I think the title for the 'Sensation' exhibition back in the Nineties was quite apt."

Edwards is a long-standing critic of much of today's art which he believes is often a celebration of style over substance.

"I'm not against conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp was one of my heroes, but I think since him it's gone downhill."

Francis Bacon once observed that an artist without patience has no soul, something Edwards would probably agree with.

"To produce good art you have to labour over it and it takes years to get it right.

"But we live in a culture that demands everything instantaneously and there's too little time spent producing art.

"You need stillness and quietness in order to produce art, and I think perhaps we all need our 40 days in the wilderness."

Dudley Edwards' art exhibition runs at the Crossley Gallery, Dean Clough, Halifax, until March 8.