Edward Bordett
Ed Bordett was born in Long Island New York; in 1952 and later attended New York’s National Academy of Fine Arts. He completed his schooling by graduating from Florida’s Ringling School of Art. After graduating he moved to Southwestern Virginia. “The Roanoke area supported me as a young artist” Bordett says; he made his home and studio in Roanoke for 14-15 years after first coming to Virginia. Since then he has moved both his home and his studio to Fincastle, Virginia. His studio building is located in an old auto-dealership from the 1930’s. This spacious building houses his darkroom, paint room, print room, framing, and gallery. Bordett also resides in Fincastle with his wife Becky and children David and Ruth.
About his Art
Ed Bordett is a painter/printmaker. His mediums of paint include oil painting and watercolor, and he is a serigraph printmaker. The subject matters that he deals with are images of urban centers to rural small towns. A big basis of his work is architecture. He paints what he finds to be visually stimulating, and what he finds to make a strong composition and design, rather than focusing on a specific subject matter. The visual stimulation, the strong composition and design are what Bordett considers to make a strong visual presence and give his audiences something to respond to, or what he personally responds to. Some of his work has a nostalgic content to it but that’s not the reason why he’s doing it, rather he is looking towards the composition of shapes that form into a whole statement.
The progression of his work started when he came out of art school in Florida, moving to Roanoke, and beginning to paint scenes of the Roanoke City market. Instead of painting cows and barns he found something that truly excited him in the way of what he was producing. When Bordett went back to New York where he grew up he continued using the same subject matter; he used lots of architecture. Lots of geometric patterns and shapes, lots of light moving across the surface of objects or casting shadows, figures, and movement happening with figures. This was the same sort of thing that was happening with the Roanoke market but on a larger scale with more involvement and more depth. Now that he is living back in the small town again he is still focusing on the same subject matter.
At times Bordett can go off on tangents from this subject matter and work with still life and moods, time of day, playing with mood and atmosphere rather than focusing on architecture.
A lot of his work reflects where he has traveled, such as trips to Maine with his family. There are many things that could motivate him to paint from a beautiful landscape to the corner hot dog stand. He has to look at his subject matter for a while and create or have some sort of emotion towards what he is dealing with. He is actually trying to have some visual or personal emotion towards the subject matter, and not be some tourist walking around taking pictures of everything he sees.
His paintings are very realistic but have certain abstractness to them. This is obtained by his cropping the way he sees things, by his trying to give his audience a different point of view, a different way to look at things to make them visually more exciting. He is trying to take something that some people may drive by everyday and know from what they see it as, but by his interpretation of it the audience may be able to see it in a whole new way. “You may walk by a fire escape everyday and not see it as beautiful, but after seeing my interpretation of it you may see it in a new light than you had before, you may see it as beautiful.”
Ed Bordett () / 5 East Main St / PO Box 93 / Fincastle VA 24090 / (540) 473-1561 http://www.edbordett.com