Beth Edwards received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from Indiana University. She is represented by the David Lusk Gallery in Memphis and the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Tullman Collection in Chicago, the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama, the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis and the Tennessee Arts Commission in Nashville. Her work was included three times in New American Paintings and featured on the cover twice. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell and Yaddo artist colonies and was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship and an ArtsMemphis Arts Accelerator Grant. In 2016, she was the recipient of the Emmett O’Ryan Award for Artistic Inspiration given by ArtsMemphis.

These are large paintings of small fragments of the natural world. Due to their size and complexity, they are slow to make. Each piece is a record of a steady, meditative painting process – hopefully imbuing these innocuous subjects with what the art historian, Norman Bryson termed a “meticulous particularity.” I am interested in how something so slight can have an impact. The paintings are meant to be both life affirming and elegiac.