© 2023 Kathryn Freeman Studios

dog portraits

Come for Drinks!

Come for Drinks! oil on linen, 30" x 40"

I was so excited when my art dealer Jaynie Spector, owner of Dog & Horse Fine Art in Charleston South Carolina asked me to do a family portrait of her with her husband Joe, their son Sean and all their dogs past and present. First of all I adore Jaynie as all her artists do. She is a lovely person with all that southern charm mixed in seamlessly with a great business mind and a love for great art (and dogs). Jaynie and I first met many years ago when I was a young artist in NYC and she was a young art dealer working at a gallery in Soho. We met through a mutual friend, Dorian Rogers Winslow, also a great lover of art (and dogs) and owner of Womanswork https://womanswork.com/. 

To make a long story short, I moved overseas, lived in several countries, exhibited my paintings in galleries in New York and abroad, finally settling in DC. Jaynie moved up in the art world, ran several galleries before settling in beautiful Charleston -and we lost touch. One day another mutual friend walked into the gallery, told Jaynie I was living in DC, gave her my number and the rest is recent history.  

If you ever go to Charleston you must go visit Dog & Horse at 102 Church Street. It is an intimate space filled with work by some of the best dog and horse painters in the world. This is not an exaggeration. A few whose work I especially love are Lese Corrigan, Robert Clarke, Beth Carlson, Ian Mason, and David Terry, but they are all incredible. See for yourself! http://www.dogandhorsefineart.com/  And going to Dog & Horse Fine Art is not your typical stuck up gallery experience. On any day you will be greeted warmly by a person, an English Cocker, or maybe a rabbit or...

So a little bit about Jaynie's portrait. I guess the big things I wanted to portray was the charm and hospitality she exudes as well as the very appealing "controlled chaos" that sort of whirls around her and those who love her.  The Spector family loves to entertain and cook and Joe publishes the most beautiful food magazine about the food culture of the south, called The Local Palate http://thelocalpalate.com/. You can see a copy on the chair in the left foreground.  

The interior is a composite of several rooms in their home in Charleston and yes the ceilings are that high. The art on the walls and the books on the tables all have significance to their family or professional lives. And if you look closely- that is a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. :) And the dogs-oh yes the dogs.  On the right with Sean is Tommy, the current greeter in the gallery. In the center is Jaynie's dog love of her life, Lucy. On the left is Joe's beautiful and devoted boxer Natasha, from an earlier time, who he adored. And the dog racing across the foreground, knocking over chairs, spilling the chardonnay and carrying the red high heel? That is  "Crazy Zed" about whom many tales/tails are told in the Spector Family history book. 




A Dog's Life and Lucky Dog Animal Rescue

This is a tiny painting I did of my dog Rembrandt who is actually rather large.  It is one of my "A Dog's Life" paintings in which I am trying to express how a dog enjoys a particular place or environment just as we do. In this painting Remy is lying in the field below the Spring House Hotel on Block Island. He has his head lifted slightly to catch the sea breeze. If you could get close enough you would see that his nose is twitching, taking in all the interesting smells that the breeze carries with it- at least for a dog.  Because I love dogs, and love looking at dogs, I have started fostering rescue dogs, until they get adopted. I am fostering for an amazing organization in DC called Lucky Dog Animal Rescue. They rescue dogs from high kill shelters in the south and bring them to the Washington area to find homes for them. Last week they found homes for fifty-four dogs. Seeing the dogs get lifted off the trucks into the arms of people waiting for them, is one of the most moving things I have ever witnessed. The dogs enter their new life looking a little timid. Some of them cower and crouch when their feet touch the ground. Then they look into the eyes of the human who is reaching for them and you can almost hear them sigh.  They know they have been saved and given a second chance at life. I am so moved by this endeavor that I have decided that part of the proceeds from all my A Dog's Life paintings will go to Lucky Dog Rescue so that more dogs can get lucky.

Plutarque

This is a portrait I did late this spring. The people who own this beautiful dog, asked that he be painted from behind- that it suited his personality. They also sent me a snapshot of Plutarque in this pose and extra pictures of the California Coast. I had difficulty parting with the painting when I finished it, as I had become fascinated with the dog and who he really was. So I asked his family to please write his biography to go with the image on my blog. It is wonderful. The painting is 20" x 24" oil on panel.



PLUTARQUE a.k.a. Mr. PLUME

After moving to California, I started looking for a new four-legged friend.  First place I looked at was the SPCA website.  The requirements were simple: a male small enough for me to carry if needed.
After entering these criteria on the website I saw his picture.  Because he is black and white, after being captured roaming the streets he was named Domino.  When I called the SPCA I was told that an adoption was in progress.  But a few days later he was still on the website.  I called again and got the same answer.  A week later, same thing, so we decided to make the trip to the SPCA.  It was Labor Day weekend 2000.  There he was, waiting to be adopted with only three days left before being euthanatized.  We were told that he had been rejected because he had kennel cough (easily treated), he was labeled aggressive (true toward men) and finally because of a lack of connection (when you meet a dog in a room where other animals have been brought in before, the dog is of course more interested in sniffing around than in “connecting” with you).  If not adopted that weekend, “Domino” would die the following week.  As I could carry him, he was young (not quite a year old) and healthy, the decision was easy.  We filled out the forms, gave him a new name and took him home.
The tradition in France is that the first letter of the name of a dog is different each year.  He was born in 1999 and that year the letter was P hence Plutarque, famous philosopher.  For a lot of people that name is difficult to pronounce and very quickly it was abbreviated into “Plu”.  When my Mom saw him she immediately called him “Plume” (meaning feather in French because of his tail) and the name stays.
Aside from being abused (we couldn’t touch him, especially the head, cuddle him) and left alone, Plume didn’t know much.  He spent the first few days running in the backyard, finding a way to escape (being very successful and us being very worried, but coming back home after a few hours), barking at himself when facing a mirror, forgetting to eat and literally falling asleep after hours of running, smelling, exploring, listening and hunting gophers.  We spent 3 months taking him to school to teach him some basic commands (the “Come” command never worked and still doesn’t), interact with other dogs and human beings and learn that not everybody wants to hurt him.  It helped him somewhat but it took quite a few more months before we could pet him without him being scared.  As he didn’t have a normal puppy life he had to be taught everything.  A couple of weeks were enough for him to enjoy going for a car ride.  One day I finally drove with him to a somewhat isolated beach.  We were on the bluff when he sat down and just looked.  Mesmerized, fascinated by the space, the smell, the noise, not one muscle moving.  That’s when I took the picture.  What was he thinking?  I will never know.  There was nobody, I let him free and he took off.  Running, on the beach or at the edge of the water, running while looking at the birds flying, running but keeping an eye on me, running until he was exhausted and came back to have a drink and let me put his leash back on.  He was happy.  He was free.  Every chance I had to let him free on the beach I did it.  And every time, I just watched him running free, happy, running until his legs couldn’t carry him and he comes back lying down beside me.
One day, Plutarque went in the guest bedroom.  On the bed there was an old teddy bear given years before by a friend.  It didn’t take him long to “steal”, carried him to the yard and “adopt” it as friend.  From that day on he carried it around, cleaned it, took it hunting with him and slept with it.  I patched the poor thing as many times and as long as I could but after more than 7 years I finally had to put it in the trash.  This teddy bear was the first of many other fluffy friends.  Mr. Plume is well known in the neighborhood for running and barking at passing by bikers or pedestrians with one of his toys in his mouth or having meeting with his toys around a gopher’s hole.
Plutarque adopted me and was very protective (sometimes too much) very quickly.  It took him longer to be the same with Mike, my husband, although he loved playing rough with him.  Months of patience and love were needed for him to trust us. 
Plutarque is different.  Too much abuse when he was a puppy has left indelible marks.  He is independent but needs to have his people around.  He needs space and fresh air and to run in the yard but he is able to spend hours by the door of my office, protecting me and ready to go wherever I go.  If I had to define him I would use words such as freedom, independence and solitude but also trust, protection/possession, need of human contact and unconditional love for his people.

Painting Commissioned Portraits

Painting commissioned portraits is always challenging. Making an interesting painting as well as representing an individual to his or her satisfaction can sometimes be tricky. My latest incarnation as a portrait painter seems to be painting beloved, but deceased pets. My dear friend and dealer, Peg Goldberg, of Longstreth Goldberg Art, Naples, FL, called me a month or two ago close to tears. Her neighbor's dog "Maxwell Smart" had passed away that morning and they were all devastated. It seems Maxwell, a huge, happy, old yellow lab was the center of their lives. Peg asked me if I would paint Maxwell with his "parents", as a surprise. This is when a portrait painter has to make a decision- do I make an attempt at it or not? My policy is to always say yes. And truthfully I have yet to paint a portrait from which I didn't learn something new or which didn't push me out of my comfort zone in one way or another. I always feel like I gain from the experience. So I said "yes, I would love to paint Maxwell and Family!" Then Peg started sending me the only resource material she had, which included a very blurry low resolution image of Maxwell, and a couple bad shots of his people. The only story I had to go on was that Maxwell liked bananas. So that led to a picnic- Dejeuner sur L'herbe avec Lab. Since they live in Naples I looked at a Winslow Homer watercolor I love of palm trees, and invented a picnic lunch, including a banana. Peg gave me some input on the general appearance of her friends-face shape, type of clothing, etc. which was helpful. She loves the end result and is giving the painting to her friends for Christmas. What did I learn from this one? I definitely figured out palm trees, and I got better at making something from almost nothing. As long as my client is happy, then I am happy to have painted it.

The painting of Maxwell Smart is oil on panel 20" x 24"

Clamming at Andy's Way


I am currently working on a group of paintings inspired by Block Island, which is one of my favorite places on earth. Andy's Way is a beach on the sound side of the island where people go clamming at low tide. This painting is oil on panel 24' x 36". I am interested in looking at how a single or small group of figures relates to the landscape and in most of these paintings I am also focusing on the canine and human relationship-a favorite subject of mine.