MoL: What is your favorite hobby?

ED: I’ve enjoyed caring for these roses especially while they are blooming, and have helped out with feral cat trap-neuter-release (TNR) programs, including 2 managed colonies. It’s easier than it seems and helps prevent needless suffering.

MoL: Who is an influential figure in your life?

ED: Josef Albers. His experiments with relative color, paintings, books, have shown me how exciting color can be, pointing me towards my own experiments and exploration.

MoL: If you could have a conversation with any artist of the past or present, who would it be and why?

ED: Again, Josef Albers. First, I would have liked to been his student at the Black Mountain College and to participate in his color exercises and critiques. His books, “The Interaction of Color,” “Formulation:Articulation,” and the recent Morgan Library catalogue, are valuable legacies, but interaction imparts another kind of knowledge or intelligence.

MoL: What period of art do you most admire?

ED: The 20th century ascendency of Modernism and its critique. We’re still suffering the consequences of that brilliant and cruel century.

MoL: When was the moment you realized you could really do this?

ED: t’s been exciting from the very beginning, dipping a brush into a cutdown milk carton or tin can half filled with reconstituted dry tempera paint in front of a simple easel with newsprint paper clipped at the top. My mother was a teacher and her classroom fascinated me—it goes back as far as I can remember.

MoL: It says on your personal site that “the subject of [your] work [has] been an examination of the methods and materials of painting.” Where has this examination led you as an artist? What discoveries have you made and what do you still hope to discover through this examination?

ED: Nearly a decade ago, I limited my palette to white—Zinc and Titanium white, which enabled me to uncover a white spectrum ranging from opacity to translucency. These compositions were largely geometric, including circles graded from dark to light, which included the introduction of black, widening the range and force of the work. In 2010, I began testing prepared red hues and arrived at Napthol Scarlet, a modern replacement for Vermillion, and worked through some of the earlier compositions. The range and quantity of tones were staggering, all from just red, white, and black. Relative color, so eloquently presented and discussed by Josef Albers, was apparent in this work as background painting incrementally became foreground with a second coat of evenly spaced and graded strokes or bars of color, including—a pulsing metallic quality, made visible as similar values of opposite tones are placed alongside. This has become my recent departure point.