Wendy Edwards

[7][8][9] In a 2020 review, Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid wrote, "Edwards's pieces are exuberant, edgy, and thoughtful ... [her] sweet, tart colors and delicious textures make the senses a gateway into larger notions about women and men, creation and mortality.

[21][20][9] By that time, she incorporated the use of extruded paint from pastry tubes into her work, creating thick squiggly shapes that played off more painterly passages and glazed fields; this technique came to the fore in her later "Net" and "Veil" series.

[31][9][4] In the early 1980s, Edwards turned to figuration that shared qualities with German Expressionism, Matisse and color field artists: lushly textured and hued paintings whose misty atmospheric spaces were occupied by cartoon-like, cropped and overblown body parts (couplings, breasts, vaginas, penises) that functioned as abstract shapes as much as images.

[5][32][33][29] Later in the decade, she shifted from overtly sexual to sensual depictions that writers described as monumental, unabashed cutaway views of fruit and other forms, "ripe with the charm of feminine fertility symbols"[24] and painted in "roundhouse strokes" and "high-voltage" lipstick reds and pinks and citrus yellows.

[1][3][27] Critics related this work to early modernists who explored boundaries between still life and abstraction (e.g., Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley) and to the athletic action painting of artists like Willem de Kooning.

[37][41] She painted more voluminous floral abstractions in subsequent works (Dreamboat, 2013), some of them nestled together like scoops of ice cream or in larger networks, as in Tipper (2012), which incorporated squirmy, yellow cut and collaged fragments from a Mexican oilcloth.

[6][8] In later works, Edwards employed a greater degree of color-containing lines and abstraction, suggesting the influence of Van Gogh's flower paintings, as in Mounting (2019), which consists of blue and violet iris petal that seem to tumble onto a field swiped with large, loose lemon-lime arcs.