Edward Gafford

Partly as a result of his academic exposure, and largely due to his own stylistic virtuosity, Gafford's art plays off many European movements. The Beer Drinker (1975), for instance, suggests Fauvism with its flat, defined color surfaces; yet elsewhere, as in Prophet or Profit (1983), he adopts Surrealism's symbolic desert landscape and religious subtext, even echoing the Italian Renaissance in his realistic drawing of people and his allegorical scenography.  Certain paintings are clearly Cubist-inspired, while others (Birth of Death, 1964) recall Dubuffet's expressionistic style.  In general, Gafford evokes the Surrealist mystery of ordinary objects, but even more Surrealistic is his method — loosely applying backgrounds in an unplanned, random manner, he then searches their cloudy shapes for latent images, coaxing his compositions into clarity, "seeing" into his own mind through the mirror of his talent and understanding.

Transcending all art historical influences, Gafford's work touches on the soul of things, bringing a depth of identity to every figure, every event, exalting it with revelation.  Visual effects serve Gafford as a tool to plumb a deeper purpose, to convey the soul experience that all animal species share (Recompense, 1988), the spiritual dimension of the humblest life, unspoken but profoundly visible.  The everyday and the metaphysical co-exist naturally in Gafford's soul-scapes, where the divine aspect, the beyond of things, is always at the heart of the picture.

In his most recent paintings Gafford abandons images almost entirely, in favor of an abstract surrealism involving strong forms and colors in dynamic balance.  These are works of active contemplation, mystical without being specifically religious. This new attack marks a radical departure from the focused illustration that has characterized his previous work.  

Although several cultures and styles converges in Gafford's art, what makes his art uniquely interesting is his authenticity as a person.  To appreciate Gafford, one must see past the usual art-world archetypes — money, social status, intellectual and critical endorsement — to the work itself, which is rich, varied, and deeply felt.  His academic background in art history is solid and substantial, with a craftsman's grasp of physical principles; but beyond all such issues, what most truly emerges from his painting is his personal authenticity.  

This study of Edward Gafford's work is long overdue, and his depth as an artist is only now beginning to be recognized.  At present, Gafford is on the threshold of a golden age of art, and his best work is still  to come.  After preparing his material for thirty-five years, a major outpouring of art is imminent, and we look forward to appreciating the results of his energy and insight as they emerge into mastery.

Albert Cherqui

Director, Albert Gallery

I am happy to have this opportunity to write some thoughts about a painting by Edward Gafford that I love, The Blue Minstrel. I have known Gafford for many years, and know his work intimately. I chose The Blue Minstrel for my collection because I believe it expresses how the power and importance of music allows humanity to “see” itself.

When we call art “avant-garde”, we sometimes mean that it anticipates its era. The Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile, for instance, seems to express DaVinci’s understanding of what his world was coming to, how the Renaissance was about to revolutionize European cultural life in the 1600s.

Gafford’s Blue Minstrel was painted in 1962, before the Sixties became a stage for social transformation, yet for me this painting foretells how music would become a cultural force for re-shaping society, how it would sound a unifying cord to bring revolutionary beliefs together. During the Sixties, it sometimes seemed that music was the driving force behind the whole social upheaval that it accompanied. When I view The Blue Minstrel, I am reminded of the heroic legacy of my generation and the music that formed it.

The music of the Sixties is till with us, and we are living in the world created during those visionary years, still striving to overthrow racism, prejudice, injustice, still challenging political agendas based on profit, sexism, and repression. Woodstock still has the power to rally youth, benefit concerts are organized to rescue Midwestern farmers and rainforests on another continent. Music is still the anthem and the agent of social action, outlasting regimes and championing social progress.

For me, The Blue Minstrel evokes the empowerment of youth and its vision of the betterment of humanity. Gafford’s art has always had a strong sociological subtext, and his “eye” in The Blue Minstrel represents his own depth of social vision, his view of music as a cultural force, the voice of profound protest and refusal to conform. The stylized musical instruments that comprise the painting’s composition resonate to history: art history, social history, world history whose outcome is still being written.

Perry Carter

Alexandria, Louisiana

Formative Years

Edward Gafford always had a natural gift for drawing, so he applied to Mexico City College, and was accepted there in 1959. This choice was to prove decisive for his entire orientation as an artist.

Mexico City was, in many ways, the Paris of North America and Gafford was exposed to a wealth of cultural influences there. At the time, Mexico City had become one of the most cosmopolitan centers of art in North America, highly attuned to the latest European currents in art, literature, and political theory.

Along with his art studies, Gafford's friendships and extracurricular education led him to an informed appreciation of Mexican culture, and to see it in terms of centuries of struggle. Anthropology informed his sympathy for the struggle of Mexican native life, and led him to a level of general social awareness that has pervaded his art ever since.

After receiving his M.F.A. degree in Mexico, Gafford and his wife moved to Nantes, France.  Here again, Gafford came to appreciate the dignity and depth of rural life. While continuing his studies at the Universit‚ de l'Ouest d'Angers, Gafford was featured in an exhibition at Maison de la Presse. He was part of a group of artists who mounted exhibitions in public buildings such as schools and libraries, and he also exhibited at the Galerie Vrignaud.

From the beginning of Gafford's formative years as an artist, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, certain basic themes and approaches were well in evidence, awaiting full treatment but basic to the identity of the artist's essential nature as a visual thinker.

In one of his earliest works, Derrick at Night, painted in 1958 in high school, a basic pictorial structure is evident, one which will endure throughout Gafford's body of work even as his technique grows more sophisticated and his concerns more complex. The stylistic difference between figure and ground is, in a sense, the picture's true subject: a realistic rendering of the human hero, and an abstract rendering of the oil rig that causes it to loom into a higher realm of adventure; an intellectual tower that the human figure is scaling, and whose focus he commands by virtue of placement and a more precise style.

This technique of giving focus by using a more precise style is characteristic of Gafford's work, in a variety of contexts. Another early piece, Persecution (1961), surrealistic in its Daliesque stage setting, narrative and highly explicit, displays overt religious content.

Religious matters are an ongoing concern in Gafford's work, in terms of expressing metaphysical truths about life, truths that transcend specific doctrines to achieve a world view of spirituality that is both broader and more intimate, about personal experience rather than social institutions. The shortcomings and prejudices of religions are, in a sense, what makes them human. Humanity is the true subject of Gafford's religious art.

Chicklets (1963), painted during Gafford's undergraduate days in Mexico City voices his growing social awareness and concern for indigenous races. Inspired by two women who sold chewing gum on a street corner, the picture explores the notion of selling versus begging, in a situation where poverty is itself exploited as a marketing device: the women use their downtrodden appearance in order to sell more easily.  "So how guilty are you?" the artist asks himself.

Still Life with Flowers (1964) involves a cubist compression and simplification of gestures and volume into two-dimensional plane surfaces. Formulated by Picasso and Braque, Analytic Cubism was intellectually revolutionary, but it has become an academic pursuit, a mental exercise, usually monochromatic. This painting demonstrates the artist's understanding of the movement.

Man Contemplating His Bread Box (1964) is Synthetic Cubism, which followed Analytic Cubism historically and offers more visual appeal. The natural course of things is from analysis toward decor, and Synthetic Cubism certainly proved to be more compositionally interesting.

In this connection, it is worth noting that Juan Gris, one of Synthetic Cubism's foremost practitioners, has a definite affinity with Gafford's own working-class principles. Gris was as the son of a tradesman who worked in the decorative arts, and from whom he learned ornamental techniques. This idea of mundane decorative devices used in a fine arts context no doubt appealed to Gafford's democratic urge to undermine the elitism upon which art's integrity is often thought to be founded.

Man Contemplating his Bread Box also emphasizes a tendency that will come to pervade all of Gafford's later work: the notion that art should be not only decorative, but also take a philosophical stance toward its subject. For Gafford, emotive content is crucial in a work of art. "A painting without content is worthless," he states. "Some mystery has to be there - I don't do portraits of flowers." Gafford wants his work to provoke thought, not necessarily to convince, nor to promote someone's agenda.

Without Succor (1964) offers an expressionistic mixed-media portrayal of the rough-hewn heritage of Mexican history, oppressed and idealistic, documentary and poetic. The use of heavy impasto effects and sculptural modeling recurs in much of Gafford's work. This technique may be used to convey realistic features such as hair or topography, or simply as an abstract textural element, often scraped away or scumbled to lend a quality of worn, scabbed, emotionally stoic, physically imposing presence to his reductive images.

The subject here is the tragedy of cultures colliding, and the attendant loss of humanity in the conflict. New World history is a chronicle of great cultures lost, of displaced gods powerless against the onslaught of European colonization. The acknowledgment that the "discovery" of America was a systematic genocide, that one's ancestors had wiped out civilizations, is something that every informed American must come to terms with. In a piece such as Without Succor, experiments in physical substance serve to ground its cultural statement, to substantiate it in an immediate way that weighs upon the drama of ideas, as an artifact of its own origins.

It was in 1972 with his painting, The Red Cape, that Gafford experienced a major stylistic breakthrough, adopting a surrealist technique that he has continued to employ to the present day. Loosely filling the canvas with vague shapes of background color, he then searches for whatever images may suggest themselves in this cloudy composition, and draws these figures into foreground prominence with a sharper focus, developing the composition along random lines, often leaving images half-concealed within their atmosphere. This approach gives rise to elemental scenes that emphasize Gafford's metaphysical subject matter, as he ponders issues of identity, states of soul, and the emergence of ideas from the subconscious.

This free-association approach has led Gafford to a produce a substantial body of work, bringing an exploratory quality to his art that incorporates the full range of his talent, from expressionist dynamics to detailed illustrational rendering. Several other works from this same period, e.g., Elusive (1972),

Carnivorous (1972), and Carnal (1972),

all represent the variety of allusion and invention that Gafford employs to depict the shifting nature of thought and meditation on subjects both vast and personal.