Ed Stewart

By Kimberly Rene’ Vanecek

Kimberly: Art didn’t seem to be path your originally intended. How did your journeys take you down this path?

Ed: Until recently, I didn’t feel I ever really had or followed an intended path. When I was much younger I never mapped out my dreams or planned my life at all. If anything, I set some pretty modest goals and put effort into going after the things I really wanted. For the most part I have made decisions based on continuance and adventure. I felt lost for years and years. My current direction feels much more natural and fitting but it took a series of painful failures to get to this point. All the right things went wrong at just the right time and once the dust settled I began to make some better decisions and began to participate in life. I started drawing again and cutting really simple stencils to spray paint on whatever I could find. It was so fun and rewarding that I started making them all the time and I slowly started challenging myself to make them a little more detailed and intricate each time. When I wasn’t cutting stencils I would grab a stack of napkins and a brush pen and draw caricatures of people on the street, at bus stops, or I just made them up and it was those actions that made me feel purposeful and gave me a sense of direction. In hindsight and a little farther away from the end of that chaotic period I feel really grateful it all happened the way it did. Things had to happen exactly the way they did in order for me to be where I am now. Life is super fun now.

Kimberly: What art medium do you focus on? What has been the most rewarding?

Ed: The stencil art. It’s really gone way beyond my initial expectations and now I’m using more and various texture techniques, more layers, and mixing it up quite a bit with that medium. I’m totally falling in love with printmaking though. I’m about to finish my first printmaking class at UTEP and I easily see myself doing a lot more relief prints and/or serigraphs from here on; so tedious and process heavy but so beautiful when it goes right. All analog, all the time.

Kimberly: What are your goals and how do you plan to achieve them?

Ed: To unlearn and trash what no longer works in my life and keep what does; to keep moving forward in all areas of life. I’d be thrilled to earn a fine arts degree, I’m taking it slow and trying to actually absorb it all and take advantage of what the studios and professors have to offer. I don’t really have a certain goal in mind, I want to do a lot of things. If I really want it, I’ll work hard and do what it takes to get it. Being a sailor and a trucker gave me a work ethic second to none.

For more on Ed, see our May issue.

Photographed by Laura Bustillos