Art Resources Gallery

Edie Abnet

Who influenced you the most to become an artist?  I was born on my grandmother’s birthday and named for her. She wrote poetry, painted, and died young. Her talent was on display and spoken of throughout my childhood. Visual imagery fascinated me as a child, particularly the Sunday cartoons in color. I wanted to draw as beautifully as Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. In my 20’s, as a young wife and mother, I looked for work by local and regional women who managed careers as artists with homes and children. I related to women balancing all those aspects, plus creativity needs and productivity. I rarely looked at the women in New York or LA with studio lofts and their names in Art News.

Edie Abnet's paintings capture the imagination in color, design, and subject matter. Often compared to the painter Marc Chagall, her birds, animals, and vegetation float to all four edges of the paper in a whimsical pattern that defies gravity and has hidden treasures. Often there are more birds or flowers camouflaged in her paintings that invite scrutiny to fully appreciate the whole. They have been described as “happy paintings”, which they undoubtedly are, but they are much more complex and layered than that. Her watercolors dominate the page and then are often outlined in cobalt pastel, which is a signature look of hers. She grew up in Minnesota and for many years painted and showed her work at her large farm in Stillwater, MN. 

What is your creative process?  The color, shapes, lines, and light of nature inspire my ideas. Familiarity; I ask myself often how can I do this better or differently. How do I make this image I’ve done so many times before more interesting? Doing an image again and again is challenging, exhilarating even. There are so many opportunities in color and line. As in nature, every hour changes the look of a tree in a different light.

Bee Balm and Black-Eyed Susan by Edie Abnet, 11 x 15” (each), watercolor and pastel on paper

Why did you decide to become an artist?  I have long felt that being a visual artist was a form of performance art. I wanted to share the excitement and fulfillment of expression through visual imagery; the poetry of color and form. What is a painting or a body of work, if it is put away and never shared? As an artist, you ask the public to accept your visions and to comment and expand on your process. In return, the public must accept that not everything you do will be understood by them. This contract with the audience is sacred to me.

 Is there anything else we should know about you or your work?  In the past year, I married and moved to the Black Hills of SD. For the first time in my life I’ve been away from the familiar terrains of MN that inspired my work.  I left a studio of 30+ years where I developed and grew as an artist.