1985 – Neighborhood Bully (Portrait of Bob Dylan). 38″ x 35″ Acrylic.
Private Collection, NYC
My favorite artists are Caravaggio, Van Gogh and Thomas Hart Benton.
My contemporary art heroes are my artistic “family”, whose heart and soul lies in the work of Alice Neel. I also love the artwork of Alex Katz and James Rosenquist .
I started as a still-life painter, studying with John Moore. In grad school, I chose to “invent in the face of reality” and made invented figure compositions with A.Robert Birmelin and Gabriel Laderman. That was good preparation for my Post graduate studies at Skowhegan School, where I had a full scholarship in Fresco painting. Thats where I learned that invented figurative painting is ‘true’ abstraction, and that the great frescos were made with great speed and with a “wet on wet” technique, choice studio practices that are still alive today in the artwork of the great contemporary master Alex Katz.
While at Skowhegan, I studied with Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Willard Midgette, Paul Resika, Arlene Slavin, and Phillip Wofford. The artist who made the most lasting impression on me was Resika, for his resistance to fashion and brave contrarian unwillingness to be stereotyped as either a figurative or abstract painter.
As a rookie in NY I worked as studio assistant for Red Grooms, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, and Karl Schrag. I also had the brief honor to work for Alex Katz’s wife Ada Katz for her Eye and Ear Theatre where I collaborated with Red Grooms doing stage sets.
I got two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1980 I founded and started a magazine named DUMB, an acronym for Down Under Manhattan Bridge, my neighborhood in Brooklyn and ”Your Favorite Art & Poetry Review”. (I thought it would be a good idea to name it a silly name because I didn’t want anyone to even think about moving into the neighborhood—which didn’t work.) The premiere issue of the magazine, DUMB, included work by Grooms, Katz, and Wofford. (This publication has gone into its 2nd printing only recently, thanks to Amazon). In the 80’s I got to know Keith Haring, and had the great honor of showing with the brilliant black artist Robert Colescott as well as Peter Dean; and also finally became acquainted with Andy Warhol. I met Andy face-to-face one day when he rescued me by surprise from the clutches of an unscrupulous camera merchant.
In the 1980’s , I curated shows for my DUMB magazine, and had several solo shows at Semaphore gallery in SoHo and the Lower East Side. I painted heavily narrative paintings that were often humorous and sometimes violent. I sold to collectors from Hong Kong, Europe and the US. There are several paintings – close to 50 – which I sold in two blocks in the late 1970’s – which are today somewhere in collections in mainland China; I don’t know who owns them and only know that they were sold in Hong Kong around the time.
In the mid-1980’s, I was in a gallery named M13, which was curated by Howard Scott, one of the few black gallerists in New York City. I received a second NEA Grant in 1989, after which Semaphore Gallery closed down. By the 1990’s, tastes in the art world had changed after the deaths of my friends from AIDS. Since I had been a rival of avant garde ABCNoRio (because of my having organized DUMB Magazine), I was by-and-large forgotten and ignored by the galleries. I was in group shows occasionally at George Adams and Allen Frumkin Galleries during the ’90s, however, and teamed up with many New York poets and Lou Reed to make drawings, paintings and publications, many of which I published in subsequent editions of DUMB. I am still working on new collaborations, and intend to publish another DUMB Magazine in the Spring of 2016.
I have always stuck to my guns and continued to paint. Between 2005 and 2015 I painted a batch of multi-panel narrative mural-style paintings, influenced by Thomas Hart Benton and comic strips. These were complicated, time-consuming contraptions that were heavy on the narrative, and formally very hard to keep balanced. In the past year, however, I have freed up from narrative figure painting. I am painting furiously since then, and feel more in touch with my original influences Caravaggio and Van Gogh — depicting everything from miscreants to flowers; and have never been happier doing so.
MY PROCESS OVER TIME
My paintings have gone through several periods, but in general have always had a narrative element, and a comic art quality.
As a still-life painter, I made up little stories. Formally, I became enamored with the the processes and work of the great California maverick artist Wayne Thiebaud, which fueled my efforts technically. I mimicked – and still do rely on make paintings that rely on drawing, and more specifically on outline or schema before relying on making weighty forms. I love comic books, and so, following my formal education was almost naturally attracted to the work Red Grooms, as well as Alex Katz. So my work evolved into more and more a process of using a lot of preliminary drawings to make my paintings.
By this time I was already a young man, and in my thirties I chose to use these skills as a channel for a lot of my youthful angst. I combined all this into a rather nostalgic “Neo Expressionist” style. I worked for the great feminist Neo Expressionist portrait painter Alice Neel, and befriended and showed my work with her and other, older neo-expressionists whose work I greatly admired , namely the great black painter Robert Colescott as well as Peter Dean. I was employed by Red Grooms, building a mammoth piece he called “Ruckus Manhattan” ( along with many other terrific young Artists, including sculptors Andrew Ginzel and Tom Otterness). I had the great artist Alex Katz over to my studio in the 1980’s and have always considered him a friend. I painted with big black comic book/expressionist outlines, as did my other younger compatriot from Pittsburgh—Keith Haring.
In the ensuing years, I took my work to other places, choosing a comic book structure for a time, and by doing multiple works using many cryptic picture forms to create a story line. This focus lasted for years, but I always tended to rely on line drawing to make my forms.
In the last few years, I have started on using the iPad as an intermediary process, from which I can electronically paint up ( and make Giclée prints) my scanned original colored pencil drawings. Of late these drawings have been of living objects or flowers. I then base the finished paintings on these works. I find myself working again on still-lifes that contain little mysterious stories, which is coincidentally what I started out to do in the firstplace.
I have come full circle in my late career, which means, I guess, that I can finally do what I set out to do in the first place.
Daniel Freeman
MAYDAY, 2017
danyo001@yahoo.com
mgmt@danfreeman.co