Allan W. Edwards

Architectural Illustrator and Artist

Born in Victoria, Allan Edwards returned to the West Coast in the 1960s after an international career as an interior designer and artist in Detroit, New York, California and Hawaii. He was noted for his large-scale hotel work, where he not only designed the furniture and decor but also produced paintings for the rooms. He had taught art in Victoria to, among others, Pierre Berton, Sid Barron and Bill Reid. He is credited with reactivating the once very influential Canadian Federation of Artists, which had played a leading role in establishing the Canada Council. In the 1970s, the FCA established a "signature membership category" to recognize professional artists with at least 20 years experience and capable of producing high-calibre work. Edwards was one of the first appointees to this elite membership category, along with Sam Black, Nel Bradshaw, Harry Heine, Fenwick Lansdowne and Brian Traverse-Smith. FCA members' work was often described collectively as "traditional realism."

In his architectural paintings for UVic, Edwards uses an illustrative watercolour style, where clear single washes of colour, contained within sharp perspective drawings of the buildings, are set against lush free-flowing landscapes and billowing cloudy skies. These presentation pieces, intended for print reproduction and promotional purposes, express the client architect's conceptual design intentions while giving form to what is sometimes called the ethos of "heroic modernism" for which this period came to be known.