Ed Musante

curated by Dieter Tremp

May 3-June 22, 2208

Ed Musante is famous for his jewel-like bird portraits on cigar boxes - and rightfully so. These paintings - at the same time delicate and powerful - exhibit the painter's enormous skill, his appreciation and admiration of our winged neighbors, and a transcendent quality linking physical representation with an almost mystical presence. Painted in the unique and demanding dry-pigment technique the origins of Musante's birds can be found in the earlier work of Nathan Oliveira, yet their true history might well be the haunting Horus imagery of ancient Egypt, a place with which the world traveler Musante is certainly familiar.

Yet inspite of its great number of cigar box paintings - some twenty of Musante's best are presented here - the Bolinas Museum exhibit provides examples of the gifted painter's entire oeuvre. The mysterious abstracted human figures and other animal imagery show that the phenomenal success of the artist's most well-known series is rooted in a deep artistic vision.

Dieter Tremp
Curator of Exhibitions - Bolinas Museum

Since his days as a nearly forty-year old student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the early 1980s, Musante has depicted birds as subject matter, partly due to the influence of nathan Oliveira's work.The use of cigar boxes as support came much later after he acquired a few intriguingvintae cigar boxes at an antiques store in Idaho while in graduate school.

Through the use of primarily dry pigment suspended in acrylic gel, a painted image is then deftly combined with these "found " elements. The results are truly magical creations, imbued with a slight sense of mystery.

Kelly Purcell

Director of the Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco