Ed Penniman
Born in Santa Cruz, Ed has painted since he could get his fingers around a brush. He works in many different media, but particularly likes watercolors.
From Ed:
“My first memory of really enjoying art was in kindergarten. The art lesson was to fold a piece of paper into eighths by folding it in half again and again. We were asked then to color in each rectangle defined by the fold lines and stay within these areas. I had a fun time doing it and did the best job of all the kids.
When I was seven my grandmother who was a recognized painter in the West started mentoring me as an artist. She has had her watercolors and oils shown at the Palace of the Legion of Honor and has a piece in the permanent collection of the deYoung Museum. She, a student of Armin Hansen, and Margaret Rodgers, Cor deGavere who was trained formally in Holland and Frank Heath, a student of L.P Latimer formed the Santa Cruz Art League in fall of 1919. At seven my grandmother set me up to paint in her opulent garden of tiger lilies. She always had a clean pan of paints, a good brush and watercolor paper ready for me to use when I would visit her. She would encourage me to see beyond symbolism and gently critique my work. After painting for an hour or so, my grandmother would come out to visit me with a glass of milk and a plate of warm cookies. To this day I can be transported back to those days if I drink a glass of milk that has been exposed to sunlight for a few minutes. This experience rooted my in the pleasure of art making.
I was twelve when my grandmother took me out with her to paint along the cliffs in Santa Cruz. We set up our oil paints and painted most of the afternoon until the wind came up. As we started to pack up our paints, a gust of wind caught Grandmothers freshly painted canvas and sent it sailing to land face down in the sand. She was unbothered by this, walked over and picked up the painting and showed it to me. She said, “Now look isn’t that better it has God’s hand in it?” The bits of sand and debris on the canvas surface were all part of the process of her meditative approach to painting. I was surprised at the calm take she had on what I thought was a disaster. I learned that for her painting in nature was her meditation and a process which included the whole experience. Now as a person who paints in the same way, as a meditation, in retrospect I see that she was still in her “zone” when all this happened. An interesting way to describe this type of painting is to think of the art as a by-product of a ritual. Like a primitive tribal right art is created as a bi-product of the trance-like meditative activity. Of course at 12 years old I didn’t understand this. It took me many years of plein air painting to own this sensibility by virtue of the process of loosing myself in nature and my art. Nature is beautiful, and beauty is healing.”