Artist Biography
William Edmonds is a contemporary Canadian visual artist and physician whose practice explores memory, perception, transformation, and the ways meaning emerges through layered imagery. Working across transparent Plexiglas, found images, and mixed media, he creates paintings and interventions that evolve through successive processes of concealment, revelation, and reconstruction. His work ranges from layered abstract compositions to the ongoing Talking to Strangers portrait series, each investigating how identity, memory, and experience are shaped through incomplete or changing visual information. Based between Canada and the Philippines, Edmonds combines sustained artistic experimentation with a longstanding interest in psychology, human perception, and the emotional complexity of seeing and being seen.
I am a physician, artist, and novelist whose work is rooted in resilience, identity, and the ways people navigate fractured systems.
For forty years, I practiced medicine as a General Practitioner in rural British Columbia. Today, I divide my time between Canada and the remote province of Masbate in the Philippines, where I live with my Filipina wife. This cross-cultural life shapes both my art and writing, grounding them in lived authenticity.
Before turning to fiction, I had a successful art career, exhibiting widely across Western Canada. My series Talking to Strangers explored anonymity, deception, and the fragile truths we construct in the digital age. My paintings—layered, textured, and often confrontational—invite viewers to question perception and identity. I have now returned to almost completely to art inspired by Filipina art and lifestyle
Across both literature and painting, my work seeks to uncover the stories that live beneath the surface—sometimes exhilarating, often unsettling, but always human.