As the last member to join the Transcendental Painting Group, Ed Garman still works as an abstract artist and continues to be an active proponent of abstract art and the work of the TPG. Garman was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Mennonite family and grew up in the Lehigh Valley of Eastern Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school in 1933, he traveled to New Mexico where he attended the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
While studying stage design Garman discovered the work of Adolph Appia of Switzerland and Gordon Craig of England. Both designers advocated a modernist approach to stage design with emphasis on abstraction, simplification of stage structure and the significance of lighting. Garman began applying these concepts to his painting, which were then enhanced by his discovery of Cubism and the writings of Kandinsky. But Garman sights his wife, Coreva Hanford, whom he married in 1938, as his strongest influence. Hanford was a student of philosophy at UNM and was particularly interested in Platonic philosophy. Through her Garman learned of Plato’s writings on the pure, timeless beauty of geometric shapes and lines. This, combined with his study of Mondrian’s paintings, led Garman to embrace the theories of non-objective abstraction. He was invited to join the TPG, founded in New Mexico in 1938 by a group of artists interested in promoting abstract and non-objective art, in 1941.