| Edward Gafford was born in Texas in 1941. At twelve, he started painting for himself and others. After more than forty years, Midland High School still displays proudly in its main hall the mascot he designed when he was a senior. He entered college at the University of the Americas in Mexico City and obtained bachelor and master degrees in Fine Art and Art History.
He lived in Texas when the roads were caliche. He lived all over his beloved State, in the piney woods on the East of Houston and in Midland in the middle of nowhere. He sailed in the Gulf in his youth and loved Mexico City, Istanbul, and France in his maturity. He tried speaking foreign languages and sometimes did.
But his language is painting. If he had the words, why would he paint?
He is not anxious in front of a blank canvas. His soul is spontaneous, his hand assured and skilled. Watch him paint in his studio or in the street, he will enjoy it. He does not look at painting as a public performance, like Mathieu. But he enjoys company.
Still, Gafford is a solitary painter. After the formative years and paintings clearly reflecting the fashion of the times, Gafford evolved his true style: surrealist in his method, painterly in his techniques and his use of color and texture, but also alert to the feelings he wants to create and philosophical in its content. He abhors the art contests, the pompous and empty "art articles", the "prize" painting endlessly repeated. Each of his works represent an original journey, apparented but unique. He does not belong to a school, a period, a cabale. In a continuum from purely abstract to Chagall-like representative, Gafford explores the register of the forms born out of his dreams and his convictions.
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