Bio

James V. Freeman has built a substantial following for his Magic Realist oil paintings. In addition to numerous solo shows in galleries, and a solo museum show, he has been honored at many juried exhibitions hosted by museums and arts organizations.  These have most recently been at Lancaster Museum of Art, Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie.  He currently has a studio in Lancaster, PA, and continues to garner press, honors and collectors.

Mr. Freeman has received numerous awards at juried shows, publications. These have most recently been a Grand Prize in International Artist Magazine, inclusion in New American Paintings magazine, (vol. 63), Best of shows at Lancaster Museum of Art , Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie and in Feb. '09, a Best in Show at Prallsville Mills Annual Members' Show, NJ.  In 2002 he was included in Doris Brandes' book "Artists of the River Towns", about select artists living and working in communities along the Delaware River, published from New Hope, Pa.  Mr. Freeman often gives slide lectures to the public at arts and educational organizations.

Artist statement

My paintings are a combination of landscape and still-life, three dimensional looking places of dramatically charged form and color, drawing from biomorphic, naturalistic and landscape sources for inspiration. There is often a crisp architectural quality in the subjects and in the total composition. I create "environments" where aesthetic impulses that represent my deepest feelings and ideas converge to form a compelling, memorable landscape that, although wrought of my personal subjective visual language, manage to transfer their basic meaning upon the minds of others remarkably intact. There is no narrative or editorial; only a quilt-work of object/landscape, manufactured/organic, recruited and ordered with intimate care in an atmosphere-rich picture plane. All of these tools I use to convey my haunted fascination with passage of time, psychological/spatial relativity, sensuality, natural process/decay, unending childhood zeal and a range of complex emotions.

These visions of intertwined landscapes and objects mesmerize with a playful distortion of scale by combining tiny, up-close objects with middle-ground and distant scenery. These images are composed largely from memory, luminous and dreamlike, in a way that is at once abstract and sculpturally realistic. The viewer often sees the abstract goal of the image before visually stepping into the spatial landscape.

In my newest exploration of the imagined natural landscape, derived from dreams and hikes, viewers will recognize some familiar themes. For those who remember "Northern Illinois Quarry Sink", one in particular that has begged further play is the hollow log tunnel; decayed and full of openings which ensconce a glowing natural landscape. Some of my new paintings, such as "Heart of the Glen", are continuances of this idea. Viewed from within the log tube vantagepoint, the landscape outside is, by contrast, wild and exciting in it's pleasing disorientation. Ordinary landscapes seem magical and unexplored. Still, the morphscape within the log is equally celebrated, and carefully interwoven with the landscape outside. Imagine arriving to your campsite late and fumbling around in darkness to set up the tent. Then waking up at dawn, peering out of the tent flap, adjusting your eyes and spatial bearing to the stunning orange glow of a sunlit cottonwood glen descending into a misty swamp. These sights burn into my mind and eventually go into my paintings.

First artistic experiences

My first artistic experieces that I can remember happened when I was 3 1/2 years old, during the cicada hatch of 1973. I was fascinated with the maroon and orange cottonwood and maple flowers that littered the ground like fireworks explosions frozen in a moment intime.......things otherwise fleeting that I could pick up, investigate and possess, for a change. That not being enough after a few minutes of bliss and wonder, I felt a need to enhance and extend the experience of the zeal of discovery by ensconcing the flowers into dried dirt chunk mounds, with many holes for light and a top hole for viewing. Eye pressed against the viewhole, I got the first one right, then built a bunch more. Only a couple of these mounds satisfied a hunger to fully possess the object/idea/experience; the rest fell short.

I believe I got the idea to augment my object of interest with an imagined optical device from playing with all of the photographic equipment my father had around the house - telephoto lenses, slide projectors, artograph plus a kaleidoscope. My dirt mounds had no power of magnification, of course, but It was my first attempt to constructively enhance the experience of an object of interest by building a relative, spatial context for it.  There's a continuance of this in my paintings today.

The cicada hatch happened upon my return to the same spot of dirt in the yard, looking for animal and plant stuff to collect. I was playing with tree flower parts and empty moth pupa shells when they started to emerge from the ground and also land on me. It was a bit scary, but mostly fascinating. The ground seemed alive with their emergence. The cicadas I picked up fit in my small hand like something the size of a cell phone, writhing and clawing to get away.

Undoubtedly the idea seeds for what I would develop as an aesthetic for design, composition andconcept in my art. Relative context, scale and design of objects and landscape, foreground/middleground/background, as well as intense interaction with animal morphology, are central to the driving force behind my art. As a boy, any mindfulness I had was largely spent scanning all horizons for intrinsically valuable visual treasures, taking me to magical places in my head. A slice of exotic sky, a bank of trees in sunrise, frogs, turtles, plants......always looking for value there, unaware of why, or that it was the gestating artist in me.