Don Eddy’s Imminent Desire/Distant Longing sold for $31,750 at Freeman’s | Hindman Chicago Art + Design sale on July 18, 2024 in Chicago. An American artist, Eddy was born and raised in Long Beach, Calif., where he worked on custom paint jobs at his father’s auto body shop. It was there that he first learned to use the airbrush, a tool that’s an important fixture in his work today. He also credits his job as a tourist photographer in his early 20s for honing his camera skills.
The photograph-like quality of Eddy’s painting is a culmination of his work experience and art studies. Known as “Photorealism,” it’s become Eddy’s signature style and is a movement he helped pioneer. The process used to achieve his unique paintings has been described as painstaking and meticulous—his system starts with a drawing based on his own photographs that are digitally edited to acquire the information he needs, followed by underpainting in three transparent colors in a series of tiny circles created using an airbrush. He finishes with the overpainting, which consists of multiple layers of color.
Eddy has lived and worked in New York City since the 1970s; the city’s complex infrastructure, along with some of its biggest attractions, are frequent subjects of his most recent work. The Brooklyn Rail describes Eddy’s work as requiring our perception to be drawn “to question the complexity in the simplest things around us.”
