Interview with artist Michael D. Edens by Kelly Jones, Jamie Murdock, and Melissa [KJ] Where are you from? [MDE] Rochester, Minnesota, USA [KJ] How old were you when you decided to make a career out of your artwork? [MDE] Art has always been, and always will be, an important part of my life. I was [...]

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These four pen and ink portrait sketches of children and kids were drawn on cardboard in 1998. The style is minimalistic and loose which allows the drawings to “breath in” the textured and grainy card board background. The drawings have a fragile quality to them, as the pen was mostly used to sketch the darkest shadows and lines around the children and kids’ faces, leaving most midtones and highlights to be filled in by the canvas and imagination of the viewer. A wash of water was also used to blend and blur some of the crisp edges left by the pen, which also adds a little bit of gradient depth.

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This charcoal drawing of Asian architecture silhouetted by a sunset was drawn in 1998. Deep reds, oranges, and yellows were blended across the background. The chalky pastels were rubbed back and forth and then dark blue and black lines were added to create a unique style in the sky. Quick and energetic lines and squiggles were drawn with black charcoal to create the hilltop and Asian architecture in the foreground. The charcoal was then smudged and drawn again to further reinforce the depth of the shadows. While the intense red colors and black lines in the sky add a certain tension to the artwork, the overall composition of the black and red shapes of the foreground and background encourage a harmonious balance with reversed symmetry.

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This is an acrylic portrait painting of a girl created in 1998. Warm colors pervade the background, like sunlight reflecting down on her hair, colored golden browns, yellow, and a touch of black and sienna. She holds a somber expression, eyes closed, deep in thought. The thick paint swirls around the canvas in brush stroke motions that convey the energy and physical attributes of the girl. Larger areas of consistent color and value help to define the planes of the subject, while paint mixed directly on the canvas adds tension and depth.

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This is a 4″x6″ mini portrait painting of a young woman and man. Mediums used include watercolor, markers, paint pens, acrylic paints, pens, colored pencils, and crayons. After working with abstracts for a prolonged period of time, an attempt was made at portrait paintings again. Some of the abstract qualities from previous artworks were maintained in the background and loosely painted hair, while finer details like the noses and mouths were worked and reworked to a breaking point. While painting accurate portraits can require attention to these details, some lingering sense of impressionistic mark making has still been achieved.

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