© 2023 Kathryn Freeman Studios

interior

High Tea with Friends, oil on linen, 36" x 36"

 This painting was a particularly enjoyable and successful collaboration between the client and myself because she is a designer and we speak the same visual language. The first time we chatted on the phone we hit it off and it was clear she had studied my paintings closely and really understood the formal elements- composition, geometry, perspective and color. She had a wall in her dining room picked out so that determined the size. She also wanted a deep space so that it felt like another window. She liked the painting I did a few years ago titled "Rabbit Summer" so that helped us with the narrative and structure. She also had some wonderful palette ideas that would work with her dining room. Springer Spaniels have always had a place in her life as well as a beautiful garden behind her home in West Virginia... and she is known for her baking talents.  The outcome is "High Tea with Friends".

"High Tea with Friends"


color samples for the palette 

Thumbnail sketch



"7 pm with Hopper and Bonnard" (If Edward Hopper's Model had lived during the Pandemic and had Pets")

2020 has been a very strange and disorienting year so far with lots of new phrases and expressions being added to our lives. One of these is the concept of "Staying Home" in order to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of the COVID 19 virus. Besides sometimes being challenging- staying home had some silver linings mainly because people slowed down and had time to try things and do things they didn't have time for in their normal full and busy lives. Many people were sheltering alone which reminded me of the Edward Hopper paintings of single figures isolated in a room. Other people saw this relationship and many Hopper paintings were shared on social media. 

One of the last little trips I made before the pandemic hit, was a road trip with two friends to see the Hopper Hotel show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I have always been a Hopper devotee. My uncle, an art historian and painter, was a lecturer on Hopper at Washington University in St. Louis, and since I learned to paint from him, I looked at a lot of Hopper paintings over many years. I even named one of our dogs after him... The show in Richmond was fantastic and I fell in love all over again with the painting "11 am" which I have depicted on the left hand wall in this painting.  I also stole  the wonderful figure from Hopper, reversed her pose and made her the woman isolating alone in "Staying Home".

"Staying Home" oil on linen 36" x 36"

But she is not alone at all. Another silver lining to the pandemic was that many people realized that it was the perfect time to bring a dog or cat into their lives. Pets are companionship and comfort and that is what we all needed. A record number of animals were pulled from shelters and placed into loving forever homes. So the woman in this painting is surrounded by her dogs and cats in the warmth of a cozy interior. The other painting on the wall is Bonnard's "Woman with Dog" -another favorite painting of mine. 

Other activities that people were doing while staying home are represented in the painting; such as learning chess, (I think the cat is winning), making sourdough bread, and doing hours of handicrafts such as knitting and needlepoint. My daughter was staying home in Brooklyn. She described her experience being in the city and sometimes called us to let us hear the nightly 7 pm ritual of people coming to their windows, shouting and beating on pots to thank the healthcare workers for their hard work, devotion and personal sacrifice. So that is what is going on in the buildings outside. 
I titled the painting "7 pm with Hopper and Bonnard" to echo the Hopper painting titled "11 am".

View from the Terrace-a Narrative Portrait

"View from the Terrace", oil on linen, 34" x 40"

Sometimes the resources my narrative portrait clients give me to work with allow me to take a virtual vacation in a beautiful location. This was definitely the scenario with John and Lee Stough. John is in real estate and Lee is an interior designer. They love dogs, travel, food, family and history and their lives revolve around those things. They bought and restored a medieval village house in Umbria, Italy and they moved a circa 1800 log meeting house from Kentucky to Sewanee Tennessee and built a house around it. So these were the rich and visually wonderful things I could incorporate into the composition. 
Since their Italian homes are in Umbria, I decided to structure the painting around the architecture from a painting by one of my favorite Umbrian painters- Perugino. I have always loved the geometry of the arches in Delivery of the Keys. I wanted the arches to open to an expansive landscape that would evoke the views they enjoy in both Sewanee and Ficulle so I settled the log home on a rolling hill, visible through the left side arch. A medieval village, inspired by another Early Renaissance fresco, is in the center and an Italian village, inspired by their village in Umbria, sits beyond the terrace on the right side above the grape arbor. John and Lee provided me with a photo of themselves dining al fresco and the two dogs are their beloved Brittany Spaniels Gracie and Tyler- one is on the trail of a clever rabbit (their daughter's nickname is "Bunny" and the other is contemplating disturbing a hungry Bear (their son's nickname). There are chairs at the table for both their children  when they visit and a tool box in the foreground to represent their self-confessed "addiction to sawdust". 

Thumbnail sketch 

Perugino's arches


Tapestry





When I paint a narrative portrait for someone I always think of myself as the weaver and my client as the provider of the yarn.  With my recent project my client provided some truly beautiful and rich threads to work with! The painting is a gift to his wife to celebrate their marriage and their family. Right from the beginning I was moved by his love and admiration for her. He took so much time thinking about the project and carefully choosing photos and memories from their many years together, that he thought she would enjoy, for me to incorporate into the painting. It was truly a labor of complete adoration by him and thus very inspiring for me to create it.

"Tapestry", oil on linen, 34" x 50"


The concept of the painting was to represent their life together and their travels, as well as personal talents, interests and occupations of the parents and their three children.

He thought that his wife would like a deep space that would feel like a window into another world. I looked to several Dutch street scenes as inspiration for the composition and architectural elements (Both of them like Dutch paintings.)- One by Willem Koekkoek and one by Joods Dommersen. 

  
           

On either side of the street are two little interiors.  On the left, a couple sits at a table in an intimate scene of domestic happiness as they plan their next trip together. There is a map on the table and an antique globe lifted from Vermeer’s painting- “The Astronomer”.  The pose comes from a painting by Pieter de Hooch titled “Couple with Parrot”


In the foreground of the interior is a suitcase with a guide to Paris and a beret - a tribute to his wife’s love of French culture and language. The Pinocchio hanging from the chair is a reference to the client’s profession.   

On the upper level of the house a young man stands with a telescope. This is the eldest son who is at SpaceX in California, working on sending a rocket to Mars. Note - the moon looks a bit like Mars - and there is a rocket stream in the sky.

Also on the left side monkeys cavort on the roof tops - these are from some of the many photos of animals taken on their family trips.

Connecting the composition from left to right is their daughter as a little girl dribbling a soccer ball through the street and a young version of their two boys, about to launch a model rocket. The family does not have pets but I couldn't resist adding a little hound in the door at the right as a symbol of fidelity.

In the interior on the right side there is baking going on. The two younger children are serious bakers and it was difficult picking which gorgeous cake to include in the painting. Also in this interior are a trumpet their daughter plays, a typewriter and an apple with a bite out of it. The younger son is a screenwriter and also works for Apple. On the back wall is a map of Indonesia -a frequent destination for the husband and wife before they had children. In the upstairs window is a Probiscus Monkey - one of the family’s favorite creatures from their many trips. It is sort of a family joke because probiscus in Malaysian means old Dutch uncle.
 

Now for the landscapes. There were so many to choose from and making the transition from one to the next to create a deep space was one of the many enjoyable challenges in this project. At the end of the street are a number of warriors from the tomb of a Vietnamese emperor in Hue, which make way for a bridge in Nara, Japan. The couple, in their early years together, are about to cross the bridge to visit The Golden Temple in Amritsar India. Behind the temple the landscape changes rapidly to Morocco and five camels just visible on the horizon, before your eye makes a leap to the vanishing point for the entire painting - which lies somewhere beyond Machu Pichu.

I feel honored to have been asked to collaborate on this project, to have gotten to know this amazing family vicariously through their personal photos and stories, and to bear witness to the deep love and pride a man has for his wife and children.


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. 




Mending the Tigers in Progress

It has been awhile since I've posted anything on my blog. Sometimes when I am working I am too involved it the process to spend time on social media or even my computer. I guess I will always be "old school". Even though I spend the necessary time each day on my computer for my business, sending images, emailing clients, communicating with my galleries, and trying to update my facebook studio page and instagram (yikes!)  I never really feel like I am truly "working" unless I am up in my studio standing in front of my painting wall. I had been working on another book and some portrait work so it took me awhile to get this painting up and running. To dust off the cobwebs in my brain I first did a full size drawing in charcoal and chalk on brown paper. The drawing and the painting are 4' x 5'. It is great to work in charcoal so I can push it around until I get the composition where I want it. So that is the first image you see here.  The second is the perspective drawing on the actual canvas. The third is the underpainting in grisaille with just the start of the first glaze. (pink area on the right) The fourth image shows more of the first glaze. That is where I am right now.  So stay tuned for more images of the progress. By the way the subject of the painting is inspired by a mesmerizing story called "Tiger Mending" by the writer Aimee Bender. I can't wait to paint the tigers!



"The Collector", oil on panel, 26" x 32"

This is a portrait I just completed for the New York collector Neale Albert and his lovely wife Margaret. He asked to be painted in his library with some of his favorite pieces. He has an astounding collection of paintings, porcelain, English brass, miniature Shakespeare books, and a beautiful replica of the new Globe Theater made by Tim Gosling. He is also known for commissioning unusual  (and challenging) projects from artists, cabinet makers, and book binders. His collection will eventually go to Yale University and there will be an exhibition at Yale next spring of his miniature Shakespeare collection called  "The poet of them all": William Shakespeare and miniature designer bindings from the collection of Neale and Margaret Albert.  They have decided to show this portrait as part of the exhibition. 
A few interesting things about the painting: There are paintings by George Deem, Robert Kulicke and Nell Blaine among others. Neale and Margaret own another small apartment two floors above their  apartment on Park Avenue, which opens on to a roof garden, that overlooks the city. They call this apartment and garden "The Morgan Cottage" and refer to it as their summer home. So to include it in the painting we brought it down to the 6th floor and opened the library to it (in the painting). Neale and Margaret are also represented in the garden, enjoying a peaceful glass of wine above the chaos of the city.  Also included in the painting are many objects they cherish from their personal life histories. I have known Neale for a long time and I did another painting for him years ago of his favorite London pub. It was an honor to do this portrait for them and it gave me a deep appreciation for their lives and the kind of focus, passion and perseverance it takes to form a collection over a lifetime. And I admire their generosity in giving the collection to Yale where it will be appreciated by many-forever.


"The Sunday Paper" and homage to "La Grande Jatte"

I finished this painting, "The Sunday Paper", just in time to frame it and put it on a truck to Dog and Horse Fine Art, in Charleston, South Carolina. My show there opens on Friday night and I am very excited about it. http://www.dogandhorsefineart.com/index.php/exhibits/item/kathryn-freeman-a-perfect-reality  Come to the opening if you are going to be in Charleston! There will be jazz music and cupcakes! Along with wine, of course. Charleston is known for its Friday night art openings.

"The Sunday Paper", oil on linen, 36" x 48"


 As you can see the interior of the painting is a typical Sunday morning in some houses-guy on the sofa, dozing off while reading the Sunday paper. His faithful dogs would love to go to the park, but their owner won't wake up and take them. So the park is coming to them.

Georges Seurat's incredible painting, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", has had a huge role in my development as a painter over a period of 30 (at least) years. I fell in love with it when I was in graduate school, -for its formality, compositional brilliance, such as the use of the golden section and diagonals, use of the silhouette, shape repetition, shape symbolism, and about a million other reasons. Seurat was a genius and so much more than the "pointillism" technique he used for awhile, which tends to be his big claim to fame in art history books. He died at age 32 and I always wonder what he would have produced if he had lived longer. He was a skilled draftsman as well as an auspicious colorist, so he was capable of anything.

Whenever I feel confused about painting (frequently) I return to La Grande Jatte along with going back to look at Vermeer's "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter". Those two paintings clear my head, reinforce what painting is about, and restore my faith.  I had seen lots of studies and reproductions of La Grande Jatte but I had never seen the big finished painting until last year when I finally got to Chicago. The painting took my breath away and I felt dizzy standing in front of something I had studied and admired for so long. I spent the entire day there.

It was time to pay homage. So I decided to make the park in "The Sunday Paper", La Grande Jatte.

I had to expand Seurat's landscape a little bit so that it was visible out the door and the side window, and I borrowed a few figures from some of his other paintings and studies. As you can see, a few elements of the painting have already seeped into the room. The monkey on a leash being held by the woman with the black parasol has sneaked into the picture along with her hat, as have some of the vertical elements and diagonals. I do realize that there are a lot of people who are not reading a hard copy of the newspaper anymore, so there is a tablet (maybe a kindle?) on the coffee table on top of the red book. So that is me tipping my top hat to new technology, while also tipping it to one of the greatest paintings of the 19th century. Thank you Georges. 

The Remains of the Day

In "The Remains of the Day" the hero returns from a very long day at work, to find that he has been away so long, a large tree has grown in his living room. His little terrier looks at  him as if to say "Sorry, but there was nothing I could do to prevent this".  He decides to make  the best of the remains of his day, so he strips down to his boxers, makes himself a scotch, and climbs up to the roof terrace to relax.  It is the story of the "everyman". In literature  and drama, the term everyman has come to mean an ordinary individual, with whom the audience or reader is supposed to be able to identify easily, and who is often placed in  extraordinary circumstances. The three panels that make up the triptych are each 18" high by 24" wide.





Here is the preliminary sketch for the panels-graphite on paper



When the Size of a Painting and the Size of a Wall don't Match Up

Sometimes it happens...A person falls in love with a painting they see in an exhibit. They take down the dimensions at the gallery, then go home and measure their wall, and they come to the conclusion that it doesn't quite fit.  In some cases the wall is expansive and the painting is just not quite large enough to engage the space. And in some cases the painting is too big or not the right proportions.  In the past year I have had two clients who originally saw one of my paintings in the gallery, but then asked me to do a similar piece for them, custom designed for a particular location in their home. I love to do this as it allows me to get to know them, and see the environment where the painting will go. It also gives me the opportunity to make the painting more personal.

I painted Oliver's Dream last fall after visiting the client in Hobe Sound, Florida over the summer. They live very near the ocean but do not have a view, so she asked that the painting open the space with a view of the water, and she also wanted to bring some of their tropical surroundings into the room. I used a palette that related to the interior while introducing some new colors such as the vibrant clementine wall.  I  painted a tile floor and worked with multiple point perspective with the eye level on the eye level of someone standing in the room to give depth and a feeling that one could walk right into the painting. I also incorporated some architectural elements from the room, such as the large Palladian windows, and symmetry.

My client asked that their adorable King Charles spaniel named Oliver be the main character in the painting, so he sits rather royally in the arm chair on the left, making eye contact with the viewer.  He loves to chase salamanders so there are salamanders of various colors hidden in the flora of the fabrics as well as on the glass table top and in the flowering vines. The client had especially liked my mermaid paintings so we placed a mermaid sitting on the windowsill, playing the flute for Oliver and the various seabirds. There is also a painting within the painting of her grandchildren, and the couple dancing below the palm trees by the water represents her three happily married sons.

Into the Trees


This is a painting I just finished titled "Into the Trees". It is oil on linen, 36" x  48". It will be exhibited at the Jane Haslem Gallery during February and March. There will be a Valentine's Day opening from 5:30-7:30 pm, so come and bring someone you love (spouse, partner, child, significant other, granny or grampa)
There will be a lot of drawings and  paintings, including "Stories from the Woods" and a number of "Love Letters".

Mrs. Paisley's Night Up


I love this poem by India DeCarmine and it inspired me to do this painting.  In the painting Mrs. Paisley takes a break about half way up, to catch her breath and gaze at the moon. The painting is oil on canvas 36" x 36".

The Gift: Wherein Mrs. Paisley
Rights One Wrong of Her Misspent Youth

When Mrs. Paisley was a child
She wasn’t what you would call wild.
She never deigned to skin her knee,
Bake with mud or climb a tree.
In short, for all of her young age
(when beastly girls were all the rage),
her main aim was taking care
not to disarrange her hair.

Mrs. Paisley eyes an elm,
hitherto within the realm
of things she’d not meant to ascend.
Yet lately she’s discerned a trend
whereby categories shift.
With fine, long limbs, this tree’s a gift.

Mrs. Paisley’s not elastic,
and the angle is quite drastic
of that first limb. While she heaves
her butt up towards  the new spring leaves,
she thinks of neighbors with a view
and hopes they’ve better things to do.

She strains, she gains the branch, how sweet
to feel its curve beneath her feet.
Yet soon she knows that sweeter still
is the second branch; a thrill
attends each branch in turn. Her knee
is skinned as she goes up the tree,
but Mrs. Paisley doesn’t stop
until she’s reached the tippy top.

Here she grins and looks around.
How pleasant to have left the ground. 







The Calm before the Storm

oil on linen 36"x48"

 In this painting a cellist plays alone in a quiet room. As she plays, the room metamorphosizes into an enchanted forest and birds begin to fly in and congregate on the tables and chairs. The cellist’s dogs listen  and are seemingly undisturbed by the visiting birds. Outside the window the sky is getting dark, and storm clouds move in over the city, in contrast to the calm silvery interior. I was inspired to do this painting after reading about birds displaced by the high winds during Hurricane Sandy. Gannets were spotted in New York Harbor, Jaegers at Cape May, NJ, and Petrels on the Hudson River.  I started thinking about the room as a sanctuary, like the calm before the storm, in the face of impending chaos.

Goodnight Moon

This painting is titled "Goodnight Moon". It is oil on linen, 48"x48". It is the second in my summer series of moon paintings. ("Moon River" is in an earlier post)
 Many of the elements of the painting are inspired by the wonderful poem/children's book by Margaret Wise Brown that has lulled so many children to sleep.  It starts off:
"Goodnight Moon...
Goodnight room 
Goodnight moon 
Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.