Edd Enders: Obsession as Survival Instinct

by Mitchell McInnis
Note: Hoboeye editor Brad Bunkers and I sat down for a drink with Edd on July 7 at The Owl bar in Livingston (the establishment Brad and I affectionately call “Hoboeye HQ”)

Painter Edd Enders is widely respected for his work ethic. In the past eight years, he’s been prolific, completing over 600 canvases. Carefully stored in various garages and storage spaces around Livingston, Montana, they are a testament to his obsessive pursuit of painting.

Enders wasn’t stirred, saying the number of canvases is “not that impressive,” reasoning that it’s the appropriate amount of output for that eight-year period. He reminded us that he hasn’t been working a full-time job during the time of their production. Instead, he’s worked odd jobs, as necessary, to buy supplies and pay the bills, and has relied on the sales of his paintings. “Economically, it can be very discouraging,” he admitted.

Enders is currently between studios, and hasn’t painted for four or five months. So when the subject of his process came up, he was happy to talk about it, his obvious passion for the work itself coming through. When I asked him if the months away from painting have made him reflect on painting in any particular way, he replied quite simply, with a smile, “It makes me think I need to be doing it… I need to pick-up where I left off.”

The truth is, Enders is obsessed with painting, and he refers to the urge as a “survival instinct.” If it wasn’t so difficult to get him to talk about himself and his work, I might be inclined to think that he’s mythologizing himself. But talking about himself clearly doesn’t interest him as much as the work itself.

When it comes to process, Enders says he drives around the area until he finds something interesting, then he sketches for an hour or so, collecting “information,” and making color notes. From the sketch, he goes right to the canvas, interpreting the information gathered onsite. It’s here that he begins abstracting shapes and focusing on the relationships between them. “You should be able to turn [the painting] upside down and sideways and the composition should work,” Enders says plainly.

Bunkers asked Enders how true his paintings are to his original sketches. “I don’t stay to true to them,” he replied, reasserting the importance of the relationships within the composition. “It’s just like putting a puzzle together,” Enders concluded on the subject.

These notions of relationships, abstraction and assembling a puzzle came up again and again in our conversation, and Enders’ obsession with the details of each painting became clear. In several of his recent paintings, he’s devised pendulous halos around several of the lights. The halos are quite arresting, giving the light a tangibility and character that takes the viewer right into the painter’s mind, into a very different point of view. Enders has been trying to get that effect right for 10 to 12 years, he said.

The halos are far from the only place where his obsession is clear to the viewer. There are many points in his paintings where the angularity and severity of his lines call out of a field of color with bold improvisation. The lines break away from the overall depiction of the subject matter and speak again of relationships, composition and fierce instincts.

Enders admits that he spends more time on each painting than he used to, taking weeks to work out the relationships within each canvas. He used to work quite quickly, completing a painting in the space of a day. His more careful approach yields wonderful things. The abstract relationships within his compositions give the joy of Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings, subject matter fading into the background as the viewer dwells on shape, color and their interaction. From there, the viewer returns to the subject matter, often a familiar scene of the modern American West. Not idealized landscapes, but landscapes cluttered with power lines, signs and cars. And in the relationships between the shapes, colors and emotions of these scenes, Enders finds poetry—poetry of the real.

Here again, Enders avoids romanticism. Born and raised in Livingston, we asked him if he was making a statement about the landscape, about the changes in his hometown. “I paint where I’m at, he replied, “When I lived in Big Timber, I painted Big Timber. If I lived in New York City, I hope I’d paint what was around me there… I need that information to paint.”

In our conversation after meeting with Enders, Bunkers summed it up nicely, “Edd is an artisan who definitely has something to say. But he’d rather paint it than sit and tell you about it.”

The urge to imbue Enders’ paintings with messages and stories is a natural one. Whether or not he’s consciously trying to say something, it’s clear that he understands the place as well or better than anyone else depicting it. As he says it, “I’m not very romantic about the West.”

Even though his obsession with painting is well developed, becoming a painter was not a natural choice. “Growing up, Enders said, “art wasn’t a respectable pursuit.” As a blue-collar kid in Montana, art is not essential, not the stuff of survival. Art can often be seen as frivolous, especially when you need to earn a living. And earning a living in Montana’s blue-collar communities is an art in itself.

The question of art’s respectability, according to Enders, changed when he studied painting at Montana State University under Harold “Hal” Schlotzhauer. Schlotzhauer is a distinguished professor and painter known for his work in abstraction.     

And while artists and writers from all over have moved to Montana in recent decades, Enders correctly pointed out, “Growing up [in Montana], art was Charlie Russell.” Russell lived from 1864 to 1926, and was the contemporary of Frederick Remington. (Russell’s art and life are both collected and depicted at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, MT: http://www.cmrussell.org/) Those same artists have continued to depict the West in all the mythic glory Russell and Remington so aptly depicted, and which Russell actually lived. In 1917, Russell observed “The west is dead my Friend” [sic]. Russell knew that the American West had changed, it was no longer the land of cowboys and Indians, no longer the mythic West that once was.

Like Russell, Enders took to adventure at an early age. He’s worked as a wrangler, as a hunting guide in Alaska, and on oil rigs, and has some true tales of adventure in his background. The kind of tales that would have made Jack London bust out his pad and take notes.

Unlike the scads of Russell imitators and landscape painters uninterested in the shifting realities of the American West, Enders studies those realities and depicts them, informed by the generations of painters that came between. In this way, Enders is a reminder of something Paul Cézanne wrote, “Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.”