Mike Edwards V. 2
- Michael Hanna
- Apr 22
- 3 min read
Mike Edwards is a counter-culture painter who has exhibited extensively in England, especially in London. Recent exhibitions in London include galleries such as Stolen Space Gallery, Koppell Project, Enter Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Phoenix Art Space, and the Truman Gallery. Mike has a portrait of Lord Attenborough in the permanent collection of The Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Sussex and David Bowie signed Mike’s unique portrait of Bowie entitled I Wrote a Picture For You which went on to sell for £22,000 in aid for cancer research.
Ranging from typography to repeated depictions of skulls to jagged forms which resemble lightning bolts, Mike Edwards creates art steeped in pushing boundaries and comfort zones. Most of his works contain his signature hot pink neon paint for which he paints in a manner of a fluorescent light. Despite the abstract nature of his work, there remains immense technical skill in the illusion of neon lights in his work, followed by naturalistic representations splattered with paint. These jagged lightning bolts, neon skulls, and linear strips reveal a retro New Wave aesthetic resembling the graphic or set design of a punk rock music video from the 1980's. Mike’s connections to pop stars such as David Bowie and working on set design for the 90’s rock band Blur, reveals an artistic endeavor attuned to the counter-culture aspects of pop art.
These forms invade our spaces through color and angularity. His ‘candy skulls’ do not seem to represent death, but rather the essence of life in their neon, glowing, and heavily distorted and stylized forms. The lightning bolts shoot up in the sky like fireworks and are connected like a chain reaction, invoking a great sense of friction and action. Mike’s splatters of paint on certain compositions reveals dynamic tension and carefree expression. The splatters do not appear random but rather strategically placed in and spread throughout the plane in order to enhance the composition and forms within the painting. Between the neon colors, linearity, jagged angularity, texts, splatters, and skulls, the paintings express deep connotations with youthfulness, rebellion, vintage rock, metal, and punk music as well as an urban street aesthetic.
Black Firework Painting (pictured above) remains one of Mike’s angular lightning bolt-like forms conveyed in a chain reaction in a painted sky. Besides the bold, repeated neon-colored lightning, the subject becomes splattered with black paint, revealing great action and suspense. Perhaps Mike’s finest work, the balance between the variation of forms reveals a painter who refuses to bend to one type of consistency in order to convey a concept or mood to the viewer.
Mike Edwards creates imagery meant to push the viewer outside of familiarity and into a realm of music, neon lights, glitz, blitz, glamour, and mania which provokes hyper-tension and excitement. His works express the notion of releasing stress and are extremely spontaneous, reflecting those rare moods where one might head out on a long road trip on a whim of energy and adventure or head out to a spontaneous wild party after a hard week of work to blow off steam. The youthfulness and urban grit of his ‘vices’ contained in these elastic, neon forms seem to bend and shift reality into a stream of consciousness of extreme jubilee and freedom. Mike Edwards can be regarded as a true contemporary painter who advances the art of painting beyond comfort levels of representation and familiarity or mere design elements, he crafts his own symbolism and metaphors of mania-induced exhilaration which express fleeting moments of time meant to savored and cherished for their extreme highs and finite essence.
