“Where would
you like it to be?”
Linden Fredrick
The American
landscape painter Linden
Fredrick creates almost anonymous scenes of the rural built environment, often
at dusk, devoid of the human figure. Although humanity has a strong implied presence
in his paintings often presented as a welcoming lighted window to entice the
weary traveler. Unlike the works of the famed American artist Edward Hooper to
whom Fredrick is often compared; a comparison that is more about style than
intent.
As Fredrick
explained in a promotional video for Haynes Gallery “I always
felt that once a figure, a person is in the painting then that painting becomes
about that person and what is that person’s story. But when you take that
person out it becomes the viewer’s story and to viewers that’s a lot more
interesting.”
A dedicated
cyclist Fredrick discovers many of his subjects whilst out riding, a practice
that allows him the time to experience the passing parade more intimately than
from the window of a motor car and with a greater range than walking can
provide.
Fredrick is
also an amateur musician with an ongoing interest in stringed instruments. He
makes cellos and is teaching himself to play the violin and it is an interest
that affects his painting.
About which
he said in a Forum
Gallery promotional video “I think the correlation between music and my
work is a good analogy because there are harmonies, there is an aesthetic, a
mood.”
Using a
palette limited to three colors from which he mixes all the colors needed for a
painting, thus creating the harmony that holds his work together and provides its
atmosphere.
As he says “I
deal with what’s called a triad in which I think about only three colors. It’s
like chords in music, so you take the key of C and there’s three major members
of that. I do the same thing with painting and it’s based on the same kind of mathematical
form.”
But unlike
the musician who uses sound to provoke an experience, Fredrick uses paint.
As he has
explained “It’s about where people live and work. It’s a lot about the road,
what we all see as everyday places. It’s also seeing the extraordinary in an
everyday place.
His current
exhibition Linden Fredrick: Roadside
Tales is on show at Pennsylvania’s James
A. Michener Art Museum until the 13th of March 2016.
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