"Cyan Dee is an alter ego of Machiko Edmondson.

Another version of herself and another way of painting. She calls these little works ‘impersonators’. It’s a parallel practice of portraiture once removed, as if there were some kind of stand-in, where resemblance is uncannily familiar, but never quite what - or who - it seems."

 

by Andrew Renton

(Professor of curating at Goldsmiths University of London and ex director of Marlborough Contemporary London)

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"Cyan Dee's A4-sized portraits of favourite pop musicians work deliberately within the humble realm of fan art, but elevate this form to a dazzling level. Painted in oils, with rare exceptions on the semi-opaque surface of mylar, to allow the white card behind to exaggerate their luminosity, each is a declaration of love to a creative spirit who has impacted on her life. Having declared her artistic intentions as a student at Goldsmiths in 1995 with her MFA degree show devoted to monumental portraits of her favourite musician, the great Nick Cave, and then moved on to her signature close-up portraits on an equally grand scale, the once-named Machiko Edmondson continues to focus on the often other-worldly humanity of her chosen subjects. These recent works on a much more intimate scale bring the viewer into direct confrontation with her (and our) heroes, depicted more or less life-sized with intensity and brio.

To work from found photographs that are available to anyone is a risky venture, especially when the photos are of people as famous and as the object of as much adulation as David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Brett Anderson, Marianne Faithfull or Rowland S. Howard. Elizabeth Peyton is one of the rare painters who has successfully worked within this sphere at a level of great sophistication. All over the world teenagers will have been attempting such portraits for decades with very mixed results. But Cyan transforms each image into a painterly rendition that is stamped indelibly with her bravura technique and her fascination with hair and piercing eyes as signifiers of personality. Her passion for the music shines through."

 

By Marco Livingstone 

(Art Historian, writer and curator)

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"Partially in response to restricted studio access during lockdown, Cyan Dee (aka Machiko Edmondson) began developing a smaller series of "painting drawings" which she refers to as her "Impersonators" series.
Often based on images of iconic figures from rock's recent and not-so-recent indie and punk past such as Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Brett Anderson and Gaye Advert, the artist makes painterly interventions which mischievously divert the outcomes from pure transcription into something "other" – creating a roguish gallery of doppelgängers, which perhaps explore something of fandom, the artifice of the tribute band and the fidelity of the painted image itself

 

By EPOX Contemporary / Jeremy Morgan

(Jeremy Morgan is an  artist and founder of EPOX.)

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