Biography & Artist Statement
Biography
James V.Freeman has been regularly exhibited in the art world since moving to the Eastern U.S. from Chicago in October of 1999. He currently resides in Lancaster, Pa,
which hosts a thriving art community.
In addition to numerous gallery exhibitions he has been included in many juried exhibitions at museums and arts organizations. He has most recently been included in juried shows at Lancaster Museum of Art, Trenton City Museum and a solo show at Isadore Gallery in Lancaster, where he is represented.
Mr. Freeman has recieved numerous awards at Juried shows and magazines. These have been inclusion in New American Paintings magazine, International Artist(Grand Prize), New Art International, Best of show at Lancaster Museum of Art and atTrenton City Museum, as well as many more in his professional career. He has gotten much attention in the last few years from arts writers and collectors. In 2002 he was included in Doris Brandes' book "Artists of the River Towns". He gives slide lectures now and then to arts and educational organizations.
Artist Statement
My paintings are a combination of landscape and still-life, three dimensional places of dramatically charged color and form, sometimes drawing from figurative sources as inspiration for non-figurative forms. There is often a crisp architectural quality behind the biomorphic and geological subjects as well. In a nutshell, I create “environments” where aesthetic impulses that represent my deepest emotional and conceptual views on the world converge to forma compelling, memorable landscape that, although wrought of my subjective personal visual language, manage to transfer their meaning upon the minds of viewers remarkably intact.
There are no narrative or illustrative concepts, no directly addressed issues; only a quiltwork of object/scape, manufactured/organic, recruited and ordered with intimate care in an atmosphere-rich picture plane.
These images of intertwined landscapes and objects mesmerize with a playful distortion of scale by combining tiny, upclose objects with middleground and distant scenery. These visions are composed largely from memory, luminous and dreamlike, in a way that is at once abstract and sculpturally realistic. One often sees the abstract goal of the image before “stepping” into the spatial landscape.
I grew up as a Huck Finn sort of boy, having spent much time exploring Illinois rivers, creeks, caves, forests, prairies, quarry lakes and urban landscapes. Before I began to channel my creative spark deliberately into visual art, I built mini environments out of treehouse platforms, foxholes, brush shelters, and various garage junk without quite knowing why I needed to go to such decorative extremes. In the midst of domestic turbulence I withdrew to such places to create, read and unwittingly develop a personal language of visual expression as I began to make art my way of life by the age of fourteen.
Even with an image designed entirely from natural elements the viewer can sense the essence of the era in which it belongs, be it the 17th or 20th century. When I do the same, the work draws from my era. Having been affected by manufacturing, science, film and television, I effortlessly mingle fascination over seedpods, insects, atoms, toys, aircraft, planets, cities and geology. I cant help but let a hint of atomic, planetary and aerodynamic creep into the way I see a dandelion stem, apple, moth or thistle. All of these tools I use to convey my haunted fascination with passage of time, remniscience, decay, psychological/spatial relativity, natural process, sensuality and a range of complex emotions.
