The complete and defiant act of Edward Inchbold’s oil painting
words: Janek Drevikovsky
photos: Nick Bonyhady
While admitted to a psych ward last summer, Edward Inchold, colour blind painter, was thinking about transitions.
“I’ve realised recently the transitions between forms, the transitions between light and colour are what painting is all about.”
“In a bad painting, people will paint in the form, say it’s a still life, there’s a jug and the bowl, but where it will fall apart is in the space between the jug and the bowl.”
Edward’s canvases are paint-loaded, craggy and textural; his colours are saturated; his subjects are people, animals, places, in place and out of place. What are his transitions like?
“I like to show things from a number of angles – that’s above, that’s from an angle, it’s all broken up, but the transitions are smooth.”
Edward shows me what he means: oil on canvas, title Shark with Green Teeth (nude), from his 2025 show Wisteria Lemonade, in which a shark with green teeth consumes a blonde nude, half-wrapped in sheets.
“I wanted there to be a sense of dissolve, a sense of editing,” says the former movie-maker, who is still “obsessed” with cinema.
I say I detect no dissolve in Shark with Green Teeth, that I find violence and abruptness, but no dissolve. Edward is indulgent:
“What I mean by dissolve in this context is the suddenness of the highlights coming through, the rudeness of realising that there are new images coming through.”
Rudeness of new images coming through
Five years ago, when he was 25, Edward stopped making movies and started to paint, wholly self-taught. He started with abstracted landscapes. Today they are remembered by bare canvas-frames at the rear of Edward’s studio:
“All of those stretchers are basically my first two shows. I destroyed all my early work. I felt it just wasn’t good. It was drug- and alcohol-affected.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about the Birth of Venus and Botticelli and stuff. I don’t have a choice except to step up … [to] make work that I could justify – that wasn’t just decoration … but something that has real value. I wanted to paint for myself and not other people.”
Slowly, something denser emerged from the paint, unrestrained and unexpected colours, more figures, figures of agency, uncovered from inside the hard-worked canvas.
Edward’s last hospital admission lasted eight weeks, his third of the year, for electroconvulsive therapy and ketamine treatment (“hospital’s like … the Overlook hotel … except more people and less ghosts I guess”). He shows me a drawing he made there, graphite:
“There was just this woman screaming the whole time. She just looked at me like this. When I’m painting people I try and give them some status.”
For Edward, the stakes are too high for anything less honest, or anything more academic:
“So much stuff happened in my life that’s been real life or death sort of stuff, I don’t care much about the distinction between abstraction or figuration any more.”
Not using colour theory but how I would paint
Edward first felt the need to paint, almost existential, in kindergarten, after learning about Van Gogh. He told his teacher, who, to throw cold water, told Edward he was colour blind. Twenty years followed with no painting.
But now colour blindness, the green-red version, is part of Edward’s practice, embedded in his three solo shows and various group showings:
“I wanted to use that and paint not using colour theory but how I would paint.”
Edward takes me to his work corner, a crate/stool in front of an easel, a low table top covered with deliberate paint. This is Edward’s palette and this is its order:
“I don’t think in terms of primary and secondary colours – I move from earth colours to cool yellows warm yellows into warm reds into cool reds into sort of violet-y reds into purples and lilacs into blues and then round into greens, cool greens warm greens, and then lamp black which is a cool black.”
And these are Edward’s instinctive colours:
“I love green. I love orange. I’m using a lot of pure colour. That yellow is straight from the tube. I’m drawn to lilac. I love using lilacs and greens.”
Edward’s lineation is equally instinctive. There are no sketches or drafts when he works – he goes straight in with the paint, relying on automatic drawing and free association and improvisation.
“I don’t believe in God or anything. I’m not spiritual. But it does feel like there’s a communion with something else. When the work is .. really taking shape … it’s like there’s a magnet behind the brush or something.”
As his subject matter emerges, Edward layers and reapplies paint, reshaping, overriding, but also preserving traces, palimpsests of the deep canvas.
“I’m very interested in the archeological history of the picture,” Edward says.
For example, It’s always raining in Paddington, another work in Wisteria Lemonade, began as a fish tank, from the hospital room where patients wait before electroconvulsive therapy. It ended as a rainy Enmore street, neon lights, and a friend.
What is painting like this for?
Edward’s knowledge of art history is “pretty sound”, he tells me. He looks to de Kooning for his abstract women, to Auerbach’s thick-painted portraits and cities, to Chaïm Soutine for his mania and treatment of the paint, and to Australian Clarice Beckett for the “magical quality” of her tonalism.
“I find myself finding these figures in history and finding hope in their struggle and successes.”
There are many ways to struggle. Edward’s are CPTSD and bipolar 1. And there are many ways to succeed.
The last painting Edward shows me is Self portrait at 29.
“This painting sort of dissolved out of all of these images that were piling up. It was nudes fighting over a pair of scissors.”
“Suddenly I got mad and I went like that [he strikes at the canvas] and suddenly I had a jaw line.”
“And it was me.”
This is Edward and also a different Edward – his features melting, nose shifting, lips broken apart – but an unmistakable plume of yellow-orange hair. The proportions are strangely childlike, and Edward tells me he painted from memories of himself in childhood photos. Except for the eyes. The eyes are adult.
What is a painting like this for?
“It’s a proof of life. My painting is a complete defiant act. Defiance against my illness, against circumstance.”
“When I was painting it I was in this state of almost complete reckless abandon. But I felt this weight of responsibility about it. … I felt like if I fucked it up I was killing someone.
“The stakes felt very high”
“But I think I won.”
Wisteria Lemonade is on display at Stella Downer Fine Arts Gallery until 2 August. You can find more of Inchbold’s work here.