Sylvia Anne Edwards (30 January 1937 – 25 October 2018) was an American abstract artist. Edwards held her first commercial exhibition in 1975, and had over thirty solo exhibitions in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa during her lifetime.
Biography
Sylvia Edwards was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Sylvia (née Mailloux) and Junius Edwards. Her father was a music impresario. In the 1940s, he hired big bands such as Harry James, Duke Ellington, and Tommy Dorsey, and founded a magazine, Ballroom and Orchestra, a forerunner for DownBeat. Edwards' mother encouraged her to draw images of the world around her and instilled in her a love of color. Edwards spent summers in a country house in Uxbridge, Massachusetts.
During high school, she attended special classes for artistically gifted students and was accepted at Massachusetts College of Art, which she attended from 1954 to 1957. Her interest in abstract art was sparked by Lawrence Kupferman, a modernist painter who introduced his students to the work of Georges Braque and Piet Mondrian and the dynamics of cityscapes.
She left college to marry an Iranian student, Sadredin Golestaneh, who was studying to become an electronic engineer. Their first daughter, Shirin, was born in 1958. They then moved to Philadelphia, where their second child, Nader, was born in 1960. In 1961, the family moved to Tehran, Iran.
Edwards spent fourteen years living in Iran, which had a profound influence on her artistic and personal development. She studied Iran's history, the impact it had on other civilizations, and its arts and crafts. She also learned about the people and their views of life, and the Iranian appreciation of beauty left an impact on her.
Her third child, Leila, was born in 1966 in Southern Iran. Edwards' husband encouraged the building of a studio for her on the lower level of their house, and she began to rediscover her artistic passion.
Edwards moved to Switzerland in 1975, before settling in London in 1977. She summered and painted in her studio on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She resided in England until her death in 2018.