Ed Ferszt
Maker Monday - August 2026
About the Artist
Name: Ed Ferszt
Medium: watercolor
Years creating: 50+ years
SCAA Member since: 2002
Based in: Kingston, RI
Click an image to view portfolio slideshow
This month we’re featuring a mini retrospective of the art of Edmund Ferszt. Ed has been involved here for over 2 decades; exhibiting, utilizing our Helme House studio spaces to create his artwork, and formerly serving on our board.
Ed’s work has gone through some major evolutions over the past 50 years. His paintings have been acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and CollexArt, among others. He has received numerous awards in RI and beyond, and has been in exhibitions both locally and abroad. - SCAA
Where are you from, and what do you make?
I was born in Up-state New York and I currently make large paintings using watercolors on stretched paper.
How long have you been seriously pursuing art?
I think I started drawing around the age of seven. Mostly cross sections of pirate ships. There were lots of art and art materials in our house so looking and using was a kind of natural behavior. That led more art activity in school and art lessons in the summer and finally early admittance for my last year of High School to Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.
What inspires you to create?
The following quote resonates with me … “the creative act is a safe harbor where life’s pressures, exigencies, and calamities aren’t so much denied or resolved as reimagined as pictorial dramas.” A painting, he argues, is “a second world, a shadow world.” It “isn’t a world of life and it isn’t a world of death.” For the artist “it is a second existence and you, the painter, go into that existence and then come out of it.” (Morgan Meis)
Which artist outside of your chosen medium has had the most impact on your art? What do they do, and in what way do they influence you?
The list is long; there is no single artist outside my chosen media but there are several that I can mention. All of these Artists present very different ways of looking and thinking about art. They engaged me to do the same and I took something from each of them.
They include:
Gerhard Richter – German-whose paintings speak a language of permanent doubt.
Anish Kapoor - Indian - Sculptor whose work is built around the use of metaphor.
Kerry James Marshall - American - painter who employs Renaissance techniques to address contemporary Black issues
Frank Stella - American painter - major non-figurative artist
Is there a work of art that has changed your life or how you view the world in some way?
Jim Dine’s “Childs Blue Wall” encountered in a show at the Buffalo Art Museum in 1963 . It totally connected to my own experience of my bedroom wall as a child and opened my young mind up to an entire new way to understand the experience of what painting is and can be.
As a member of SCAA, what do you like most about us?
What I like most about SCAA is the commitment to support the creation of artistic order unlike the disorders of our social and political lives. And to do so humanly, thoughtfully and with consideration for the collective welfare for the community.
Tell us a joke.
Reb Shepske Szcuczynski complained to his doctor that he couldn’t pish?
“How old are you?” asks the doctor…. “Ninety-three years, thanks God,” Reb Shepske proudly announces. “Hmm,” says the good doctor, stroking his beard, “you already pished enough.”