Ed Musante

Ed Musante is famous for his jewel-like bird portraits on cigar boxes – and rightfully so. These paintings – at the same time delicate and powerful – exhibit the painter’s enormous skill, his appreciation and admiration of our winged neighbors, and a transcendent quality linking physical representation with an almost mystical presence. Painted in the unique and demanding dry-pigment technique the origins of Musante’s birds can be found in the earlier work of Nathan Oliveira, yet their true history might well be the haunting Horus imagery of ancient Egypt, a place with which the world traveler Musante is certainly familiar.

Yet inspite of its great number of cigar box paintings – some twenty of Musante’s best are presented here – the Bolinas Museum exhibit provides examples of the gifted painter’s entire oeuvre. The mysterious abstracted human figures and other animal imagery show that the phenomenal success of the artist’s most well-known series is rooted in a deep artistic vision.