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March 20, 2009
Painter creates beauty
Industry and nature converge in Revelations.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Shelley Freedman's solo show Revelations reveals a sensitive and original artist whose inspiration synthesizes the mundane and spiritual into seamless images of beauty. The show opened at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery on March 12, 2009.
A computer wizard and artist, Freedman brings together two diverse interests and skill sets. On one hand, this petite, exuberant lady has an affinity with digital technology; she works as a web administrator, has a Flickr page and a Twitter site. On the other, her aesthetic, intuitive perception of the world is firmly rooted in the ancient past.
From childhood, Freedman was very creative. One of her earliest photographs at the age of two depicts her holding a paintbrush beside her grandmother, who was a professional artist. "I always loved the smell of oil paint," Freedman recalled.
Her connection to her grandmother survives to this day: she often uses her grandmother's old canvases for her paintings. She lovingly calls them "repurposed canvases.”
There are six such repurposed canvases in the show. Two of them have the same name, "Nebulous." The paintings, while similar, are unique, creating a diptych of immense blue, a double dream sprinkled with golden dots and nebulas. A deep joy of life throbs from the canvases like jazz improvisations. According to the artist, "The atmosphere is heavy with possibility. I took great pleasure in brushing loose swirls of color over textural framework created by my grandmother decades before.... The canvases contain 'the bones of the paintings,' the legacy and history of those before us. They are imbued with the spirit of my grandmother, and in a more general way, my family. There is an inescapable sense of connection that is honored and shared..
Weaving together strands of art and technology like a tapestry, Freedman uses her knowledge of computers to create her paintings. She often walks around the city with her camera. "I seek the incon- gruous, the forgotten, the temporary and the abandoned to tease out their stories," she said. She is often engaged by the light industrial areas of the city where the geometry of man-made objects converges with the flowing lines of nature. Then she loads the pictures into the computer and builds digital collages, often assembling more than one snapshot into compounded, sophisticated images. "I play with color, movement and meaning," the artist confessed.
Fascinated by the creativity of pixel manipulation, she enjoys Photoshop's speed and multi-layered functionality. "I test and refine my ideas on computer before I invest the time on canvas," she admitted. But of course, painting is a different medium and it frequently veers away from the digital printout, pulling its creator towards uncharted waters and unexpected discoveries.
"Winter Swept" was born – in the same way – out of the unprecedented December snowfall with autumn leaves twisting in the wind and a stocky, unromantic industrial building. Nature and technology courting each other in the service of man, the painting is full of contradictions. A stationary structure anchors the windy world and warm orange leaves whirl in the air like snatches of a wild symphony.
Sometimes a movie or a book sparks the artist's imagination. For example, The Last Cowgirl by Jana Richman influenced the painting "Naramata," named after a charming village in the Okanagan Valley. The imaginary landscape of the painting is haunting and beckoning simultaneously, shot with an amalgam of anxiety and tranquility. The yellow grasses of autumn sway under a gentle breeze, and a mysterious ivory cloud climbs on the shore from the lake. Is it a dragon? Is it pollution? The purple mountains watch indifferently from their distant heights.
Attuned to the world and the people around her, Freedman often transforms suffering into joy in her art. When the first wave of the current financial collapse hit the media, prompting panic and painful anticipation around the world, Freedman created "Vortex," a painting suffused with hope and radiant energy. Heralding the changes in our values and circumstances, the painting arose from another industrial collage, which combined pipe elbow joints and a scene in a tree-lined neighborhood. Nothing of the original, everyday items remains in the resulting abstract composition. "Vortex" is a triumph of turquoise and gold. The waves of color curl and spiral into the trumpeting vortex, taking away the uncertainty, inviting optimism.
The same theme of rebirth, grace sprouting from ashes, characterizes "Dahlias," an elegant, lovely painting of dying dahlias. The artist was out, taking photos on a late summer day, when she came upon an exquisite garden, tended for 40 years by the same family. The owners kindly allowed her to take photos. One of the most profound photos she took in that garden was an unlikely image of cuttings in the compost. "They were just past their prime, with intense colors, showing imperfections that make us all so interesting," she remembered.
Shelley Freedman's paintings reveal the artist's inner beauty, resonating with everyone around her. "Why I paint?" she asks herself. And she answers: "To create my version of reality. To provide refuge from our daily life. For the sheer physicality of painting. For the joy of creating a mood from mounts of pigment."
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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