Edward Glannon is a poetic painter; that is, his pictures are beautiful comments on the beauties of existence. He is a romantic painter because he understands other aspects of existence and comments on those in the same way. His work has, too, the kind of brevity that comes with an understanding of the economy of abstraction necessary to telling composition….Being the result of meditation, it can be approached only through the medium of meditation….

In the long run, one is alone with one’s canvas. He who knows this, and has embraced this loneliness as his natural good, can never be deceived by success or failure. There is no power like the power to enjoy your own company….

Glannon, whatever his personal struggles, paints as a solitary thinker. “Black Horse” is an example of the kind of effective simplicity of subject which should endear him to the reflective eye…the dark silhouette of the animal standing against the sky, in a meadow which seems to contain all the flowers of spring. This picture is more thoroughly worked over than one would suspect. It succeeds plastically because of the underlying affection which gave rise to the concept.

“The Starling and the Storm” illustrates again how poetry of feeling can humanize modern technology, as Edward Hopper has more than once proved. The little creature perched upon the frail wire against a patch of light in the wild sky reminds us of the flashing moment of time the Japanese are so fond of trying to capture in their brief little Haiku poems.
“Going to Work,” with its solitary figure and his lunchbox, trudging through the dawn-illuminated snow seems to me to continue the humanistic-naturalist tradition of Pisarro and Sisley. It tells about a cold morning and about a human being paying the price of existence, with is daily labor. It is bleak without being pitiful. It says: this is man’s lot… this is the meaning of responsibility…day-in-and-day-out perseverance…the minor epitome of unnoticed but universal courage…not greatness, but unpublished tenacity. The picture seems to show the futility of the phrase: “above and beyond the call of duty”…that there is within the confines of duty a courage that, though too common for citation, may require a heroism divorced from the spectacular, of equal worth.

In a statement about painting, the artist says very well the thing which is incorporated in his own work: “I prefer an art which is willing to bend its back to carry human freight. It seems to me that the great art of the past has always done this and was the stronger for it.”