I was born on the Northwest Side of Chicago in 1939 into a modest working-class family of mostly Polish ancestry. All my relatives played the accordion and the concertina. My father, though he was never a professional artist, always made things with his hands. He crafted re-creations of Disney characters and miraculous fish out of clay and wood, and he would make the most wonderful pictures. To me it was pure magic. When my father was in the Army during World War II, his communiques to me and my older brother were in the form of cartoons. We loved them. I think it was really a combination of my father’s influence and of watching those early Disney animated features like “Song of the South” that got me hooked at such a young age on art and the creative process. I just thought it was the most enchanting thing a person could do.
So Little Edward always loved the opportunity to express himself visually-and publicly, I might add. Even as a teenager when I played a lot of sports and flirted with delinquency, art was always the mainstay for me. Going to the School of the Art Institute for college was the natural thing for me to do, and my high school teachers really encouraged me to pursue a career in art. At the time, I never really thought about how I was going to support myself financially down the road. You don’t go into this field to make money, you go into it because you have to. Art was an important psychological vehicle for me for relating to the world.
I was a bad student in high school. But when I went to the Art Institute, I suddenly discovered the world of books. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I felt that I was really behind everyone else. It was like a race had begun and I was way behind the starting gate. Even to this day I feel that a little bit. But maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s what motivates people.
I graduated with a B.A. in art in 1961 and held a string of menial jobs. One was as a psychiatric aide in a mental institution. I think my brother, who became a psychologist, and I were always interested in what drives people. I also worked as a flunky in a commercial art studio. Then I was drafted into the Army. Most of the people I knew found ways to get out of it, but as corny as it may sound, all the males in my family had been in the Army, and to me, it was a duty. The Army did provide me with a lot of interesting experiences that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. I certainly gained the ability to impose discipline on myself, which is important for an artist.
When I got out two years later, I still had no future, no prospects. One of the things I had done just before being drafted was sell a few spot illustrations to Playboy magazine. I continued doing that, I was painting a lot and I even got a strange job making training films for astronauts. I used the G.I. Bill to get my master’s in fine art, again at the Art Institute, and graduated in 1970.
My first real break came when I began to show my paintings at the Hyde Park Art Center, which was run by Don Baum. He was a very important influence for me and other artists, including Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum and Roger Brown, who were soon dubbed the “Chicago imagists.”
That term was coined by a local art critic in the early ’70s to describe a certain style that seemed to permeate the work of the artists Baum exhibited at Hyde Park: a certain funkiness, a concern for psychological and introspective forms, pictures derived from pulp-magazine ads and other low-class sources. It was a mix of pop art and surrealism, more organic than geometric, hot as opposed to cool. I don’t think that any of the artists involved would really ID themselves as Chicago imagists. Every artist resents being typecast and labeled. At the time though, people seemed to say, “Yeah, that’s it,” of the imagist description.
Most of the sources in my own work were old movie stills and various things you would find in the media. I combined these images, juxtaposing one with another, into collages. I have always been interested in sociological connections. The other imagists seemed to me to be influenced more by folk and outsider art. But the work as a whole was soon thought of as a homegrown style, and it began to be exported.
The pattern for artists always used to be that if you had an ounce of talent, you left Chicago and went to New York. I agonized about it in the earlier years, but Chicago just feels comfortable to me. It’s a very ethnically diverse city, and its scale and density suit me. There used to be this theory that ideas germinate on the coasts, and that later they would get to Chicago.
In many ways people in the arts and comedy can hone and develop their craft and take creative risks here and not be subjected to the fickle trendiness that seems to be so prevalent in New York and Los Angeles. You can focus here. A lot of artists felt they were being ignored, and in some ways that was a liberating realization. I am not really sure how much this is still the case for the younger artists, because my generation is now the establishment. A real broad base of support has developed here in the years since I was getting started, thanks in large part to the International Art Exposition. There used to be this old guard of something like six collectors, but that’s not the case anymore. The Chicago audience is much more sophisticated when it comes to art and collecting. It’s not as necessary for the artists to leave now to survive.
One of the ways I try to stay in touch with the new generation is by teaching. I am a full professor at Northwestern University and currently the acting chairman of the Art Department. I teach drawing and painting at the graduate and undergraduate levels and a class in media and process.
People ask me why I am still teaching after the success I have had. I do it for several reasons. The teaching salary insulates me from the tendency to make commercial decisions in my work. Teaching also offers me a situation in which I can walk into a room with 18 or 20 people in it and have this dialogue with them. It balances out the isolation of the studio. Finally, I actually like teaching. There’s nothing as gratifying as planting seeds in someone else’s mind.
I read somewhere, I think it was Aristotle, that the ideal human being divides his time among intellectual, physical and emotional pursuits. I begin my days by exercising. Then I go to my studio in Evanston and confront the problems in my work, but I can’t remember the last time I actually sat and painted for eight hours straight. I take lots of breaks, and I find I always come back to my work with a clearer, more objective point of view that helps me make the difficult decisions, like knowing when a painting is finished. I always listen to music when I paint, and most of it I pick up from my students. That’s another advantage to teaching: It lets you sort of keep your thumb on the pulse, the voice of a new generation. When you think about culture and art, it’s something that is constantly evolving, and I think it’s important for an artist to be part of that evolving link.
There used to be a strong television influence on my work, but most recently the major influence on me has been my own face. Until now I had never really done self-portraiture, but I’ve been trying to examine my own life recently-who and what I am. I thought a series of self-portraits might help me arrive at a heightened self-realization. I have to admit that the process didn’t provide me with the insights that I thought might be there, but the experience was still useful and helpful. To some extent, being an artist is like being in therapy.
Sometimes my art is described as violent and aggressive. Part of that is my exaggerated sense of color. I think that comes from the time I have spent in Mexico. Still, I always wanted to put together images that couldn’t be brushed aside as decorative. They aren’t always violent, but they are always confrontational. I can’t really generalize about 25 years of work.
The Art Institute’s 1989-1990 retrospective of my work, which also traveled to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Dallas Art Museum, was a very sobering thing. “Retrospective” was a word I always associated with people who were dead. It was this epitaph kind of experience. I mean I always feel like I’m just getting started, and here was this record of my life being held out for all to see. Perhaps my recent interest in self-portraiture is a response to that. I was dreading the experience of walking through the exhibit. I was afraid I would regard everything as a failure. I never want to rest on any sort of laurels.
