Artists I've known: Edward Landon (1911-1984)

Growing up, my sister and I had to accept the New England temperament of my mother's family, where disputes could rage silently for generations until branches of the family tree eventually dropped off. If the stoicism didn’t scare us, it sometimes prompted gales of laughter and a pact that we’d never act so foolish. But a disposition that valued independence also prized creativity, and my grandparents were surrounded by artistic types who were lured to Vermont by nature and its promise of fulfillment.

Edward Landon was part of that constellation. Lest you think I’ve abandoned the geographic mandate of this blog, Ed and his wife lived in Greenwich Village until the late 1950s, when they moved to Vermont. Ed started out painting but eventually specialized in silkscreen printmaking, or serigraphy. His work through each decade – from the 1940s until the 1980s – mirrors the major trends of the time, with Arthur Dove and Picasso perhaps his greatest influences. My mother helped him in his studio as a teenager, after an accident rendered him paralyzed from the waist down. Indeed, his wheelchair probably made the biggest impression on me as a kid.

Finding a single print to represent him was difficult, and so I chose Family Tree (1984) because it reminds me of the Vermont landscape and its self-reliant inhabitants, holding each other at arm's length. I happen to have three of Ed's prints; my favorite is At the Gallery (1981), of - what else? - a woman gazing at a painting.