Give Ed Larson a call at his Canyon Road studio Gallery in Santa Fe and most likely you’ll get his answering machine. It goes something like this, “You’ve reached Wonderful Ed’s studio. They call him that because every time he finishes a piece someone will say, that’s wonderful Ed…” The tape goes on but you get the idea.

Ed has been writing poetry, painting people, horses and whittling images all his life. He was born 70 plus years ago in Joplin, Missouri. According to Ed a lot of what makes his art tick happened to him growing up there. The highlight of his family’s week would be when his Dad piled everyone in the family car for a Sunday drive.

Gas was 12 cents a gallon so for two bits you could about circle the county. A part of their tour was down Main Street to see the animated figures that performed in a mechanical tableau. The local bread company operated this remarkable extravaganza to advertise their product. Another highlight was a series of whirly gigs displayed on a farmer’s fence West of town on old Highway 66.

There was no TV back then. There were movies and mostly what Ed saw were Westerns at the Rex where two shows could be seen for a nickel. In high school Ed got to try out all the tricks he learned watching cowboys on the borrowed horses of a friend. This included racing his horse through Shoal Creek just like Jesse James had done on the silver screen.

Ed thought he had missed the big war but then he and his friends got one of their own. It was called a police action or the Korean War depending on your politics. This put Ed abroad a Tanker, hauling aviation gasoline.

Ed’s life as a deck hand on that ship is well recorded in a series of paintings in his studio about his life as a sailor. Some of Ed’s memories include loneliness, typhoons, going over the hill in Panama, the brig, and the loss of life at sea. But everything was dismissed by his shipmates with the same comment; “It won’t be like this in Long Beach.”

After the Navy Ed found his way to the old Art Center School in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles…Following Art Center Ed spent a dozen years working in Philadelphia and Chicago, as an Art Director in two major agencies. He also worked for several lesser agencies and a toy design house and as a professor at the Chicago Art Institute. The way Ed tells it: After he had been fired three times he decided to quit the whole biz.

You can take your choice about the next part. 1. With four children he started to work seriously toward as career in Art. Or, 2 since no one would hire him he didn’t have any choice. Whichever, Ed found room for a studio in his home and started creating a statue of Libertyville, then big animal wind toys. This broadened to include political statements in the form of wind toys about humorous events, Chicago politics and the entire Chicago Bears offense team all powered by propeller driven crank.

Ed then began designing picture quilts. He located quilters, bought the fabric and presented the quilter with his pattern and color scheme and slowly accumulated a group of pictorial quilts. This process of collaboration was necessary because Ed didn’t sew. The process and the quilter’s fabric choices brought out the best in Ed’s patterns. One of these quilts wound up in the Smithsonian and another was chosen one of the 100 best quilts of the 20 th Century.

His first art show was at the Horwitch Gallery in Chicago and featured picture quilts and wind toys. That was successful enough to put him in the just starting Chicago Navy Pier show. From this exposure Ed gained the support of several galleries from the Jan Baum in LA, to the Zolla Lieberman in Chicago, the Horwitch in Santa Fe, and the Monique Knowton in NYC. Then catastrophe struck. Ed lost $250,000 worth of his art in the Chicago Art Fire that burned out a dozen galleries including his base gallery, the Zolla Lieberman. It wasn’t a complete bust though. They had insurance. Not much but some. With a stake from the settlement Ed figured it was time he did something he had always wanted to do. He headed out West to Santa Fe.

He has been there, on Canyon Road for 16 years. The influence of the light or just being in Santa Fe has developed Ed’s painting, his sense of color, and if you ask him, he says, “I just wish I had come sooner.”

In Santa Fe Ed bought ranch land near Cerrillos, New Mexico, on live water. He built a ranch house, built a running shed and bought some horses (And Ed got married again….this time it took.) Bonnie and Ed’s new home on the Galisteo River Basin was like a dream come true. His place was right smack on the trail of Coronado’s trip to Pecos to find the Seven Cities of Gold.

Ed’s art is not easily described as this, or that. He builds objects with found materials. Makes really big fish. He carves horses, birds, bears, and people (from whatever is available) wood. He paints scenes from his experiences, whether it is his unsuccessful summer as a wheat harvester, the Navy, or his lack of ability as a cowboy to stay on a horse. Ed says he is a self-taught as a painter.

His work has a folk art quality. He often works in tractor paint, oil base enamel you get in the hardware store. His pictures are steeped in an oral tradition. They tell a story. Ed has strong liberal opinions. His art is what he talks about. It is personal. It is a combination of his experiences and his sense of historical people he likes and doesn’t like. He likes Geronimo. He doesn’t like Custer.

Ed’s eight children, and even his grandchildren all do pretty dang good at painting. “I may not be here forever,” he says, “but I got a legacy coming up.” His wife Bionnie is a writer with two books to her credit. Ed says, “I think of myself as a folk artist and I would like to leave everyone with this thought. Jesus said, ‘Buy folk art,’ plus ‘Trabajo Garantazado.’”