Don Eddy was born in 1944 in southern California. He attended the University of Hawaii where he earned his M.F.A. and M.F.A. degree; he later attended the University of California at Santa Barbara for his post-graduate work.
Don Eddy's painting style and technique is unlike any other. A photo-realist, he works on paper with acrylic on canvas as well as in colored pencil. He first paints the entire canvas green, then brown, and then purple. With these three layers he separates warm from cool colors. After the three layers of under painting color, Eddy often adds 20-30 transparent layers of glazing in different colors to achieve the powerful visual impact of his palette. In the last ten years, he has moved from images of toys floating in front of landscapes and majestic architectural interiors within the perimeters of one rectangular canvas to juxtaposing images in triptych and polytypch configurations. His juxtaposition of images is never literal, narrative, or didactic, but poetic, infused with his interest in things philosophical and spiritual.
Water is a perpetual motif for Eddy; the ocean in its manifold richness, a waterfall in winter, water poring from hands, water crystallized into ice. Water is both physical and spiritual; it is that which brings and that which takes life, the ultimate conveyor and source of energy. Similar to water, there are other images that are "keywords" of Eddy's vocabulary: flowers in full bloom be they flamboyants from the Caribbean, magnolias from Dunbarton Oaks, or oleander in France; hands grasping and giving strength from man to man, passing a gift from woman to man; architectural ruins the one remaining wall of an ancient ruined abbey in England; the columns of the marketplace in Rome, to name a few.
It is said that a prominent sensation that one often walks away with after studying Eddy's paintings is that of celebration, a celebration of life at its simplest