Interview with Edmond Praybe

This interview accompanies Edmond Praybe’s solo exhibition
“Family of Things”at SFFA Main Street Gallery
On view May 2 - May 31, 2025

Opening Reception & Artist Talk: Sunday, May 4th, 1-4pm

Sarah-Faith Strait, assistant gallery manager and gallery artist at SFFA, had the opportunity to ask Edmond Praybe a few questions about the paintings in his upcoming show “Family of Things.” You can read through their conversation below.

This interview was featured in Steven Francis Fine Art’s weekly newsletter, published April 25, 2025. Sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of this webpage to receive interviews like this, information on exhibitions, and more.

Sarah-Faith Strait: Is there a pivotal moment(s) from your past that you believe put you on the path to being an artist?

Edmond Praybe: There are three key things that set me on the path to be an artist. The first was drawing with my dad from the time I was very young. It’s something we did together frequently from the time I was maybe 3 or so, through elementary school. We would just draw random things together—swords, cowboy boots, animals. My dad enjoyed drawing when I was younger and was quite good at it. I just picked it up from him and kept going with it.

Second, there were school field trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for which my mother chaperoned. I loved the whole vast range of beautiful objects: from paintings, drawings and sculptures to arms, armor, musical instruments and textiles. The Met always felt like a sacred space, full of sacred objects, although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it in this way at the time. I think experiencing it as a young person somehow subconsciously made me want to attempt to make my own contribution to the world of sacred objects.

Finally, it wasn't until I was already an undergrad in art school that I realized I wanted to be a painter. I went to college planning to do graphic design or illustration. But once I took a painting class I was hooked and realized I had no interest in design or illustration, at least as far as my own work or career. It was the painter Carl Plansky that opened me up to what painting is really all about. He was incredibly generous with his teaching, time, and even materials. Many people will know Carl as the founder of Williamsburg Paints. He saw something in my work and encouraged me to keep painting, and I’m forever grateful for that.

SFS: I know that you paint mainly from observation. I see that some of the images included in this show are a composite of multiple viewing sessions, which in turn causes the subject matter to become abstracted. What compels you to work in this way versus painting from an unchanging subject?

EP: You enter every session with a painting as a slightly different person (new experiences, new inspirations, new concerns, differing emotional states, etc.), so it seems to make sense to me that the subject has to change a bit as well each time I approach it. So I change the still life or move my position in relation to the landscape or have my model shift the pose a little. It helps me from continuing to repaint from a point at which I believe I am ‘right’ about what I’m seeing. It makes me question things anew each time. As a result of this constant bit of change throughout the process of a single painting also adds a visible element of time to a static image: the pentimenti of change shows that there was a ‘time before’, an earlier state.

SFS: While your paintings have obvious subject matter—landscape, still-life, portraiture—to me, your paintings have a strong impact and emphasis on color, shape, and space. No matter the subject matter your paintings visually push and pull between deep space, and flat, two-dimensional shapes of color, which I find rather visually engaging. Do you want to elaborate on this?

EP: To me, this is probably the single most exciting thing about painting, that ‘snap’ back and forth between the organization of flat shapes and the indication of volumetric form and space. How do you make something make sense both as a flat piece of color and part of a form that has mass or an area in the distance? How do all of those shapes fit together on the surface like a puzzle and make a pleasing compositional arrangement? I don’t know exactly, it changes with each painting, but those are the interesting questions when it comes to the mechanics of putting together a painting. How is a painting its own object at the same time that is represents objects in the known world? This is what keeps painting from being an exercise in copying reality and makes it about creating new worlds that have their own internal logic.

SFS: I’m curious to know which artists are currently influencing your work?

EP: As usual for me, I’m looking at a wide range of works right now. I’ve been looking at a good deal of British painters from the second half of the 20th century—William Coldstream, Euan Uglow, Patrick George. They take working from direct observation, something that could become cold and academic, and turn it into something magical, beautiful, and actually, quite interesting.

I’ve also been going back to Braque and Picasso, especially the synthetic cubist works. I find the collaged drawings and collage inspired paintings really appealing for the way that they break up objects and spaces and fit them back together to create a structure that is really all about how the whole image exists as a thing unto itself.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’m looking at some Dutch and Spanish still life painters, paintings where forms are highly rendered. Cotan, Zurbaran, Adriaen Coorte and Jan Davidsz de Heem are all my favorites. The tactile quality of the things they paint is so beautifully realized but also held within an abstract compositional arrangement.

Lastly, I keep going back to Persian and Indian Miniature paintings. The complexity, the color, the stacking of space, and the play between flat color and pattern is endlessly exciting.