© 2023 Kathryn Freeman Studios

oil painting

Commissioning a Painting


I thought I would take this moment in time to write a little bit about how I do a commissioned painting whether it is a poetic realism composition, a simple portrait of a person or a pet, a complex narrative portrait, or something in between. 
"Plutarque"
"Portrait of a Young Poet"

"Toby with Jed and Bizzy"


I love painting for an individual or family. It is a collaboration and most of my clients seem to enjoy the creative process. It can be a painting similar to my "Interior Dreams", "Animal Dreams" or a "Story from the Woods" series or it can be simply a landscape or a depiction of certain place that has meaning to the individual. It can also be a narrative portrait telling the story of an individual or family.  This concept is based on portraits from the Renaissance in which the artist depicted aspects about the life of the subject as well as a painted likeness. 
The process can be completely virtual without me ever meeting with the subjects in person and when it is finished the painting will be shipped to the client. It starts with an email exchange in which I send a series of questions to get to know what the client is looking for in terms of the painting size, who or what is to be the subject of the painting, where the painting will be hung etc.
Once I have this information, we set up a phone call which could also be a facetime or a zoom meeting. And at this point I ask for a few photographs to be emailed or texted to me as beginning resource material. After that I start working up a composition. This is a small sketch on grid paper with written notations. I email the sketch to my client for changes or approval. When the composition is set, I often ask the client to take specific photos and email them to me, if necessary. Then I build the canvas using all archival materials and start drawing, then painting. If the client is interested in seeing the process, I am always happy to send photos as the painting develops.

I especially love painting a human with their four-legged best friend, or just the four-legged friend. Or all the four legged family members from a person's lifetime as in the last painting in this post called a "Lifetime of Animals.  Please feel free to contact me for more information and pricing.

Preliminary Sketch for "Shadow's Woods"


Final Painting "Shadow's Woods"



 
Preliminary Sketch for "Come for Drinks"


Final Painting "Come for Drinks"
Preliminary Drawing for "Sunday Morning with Shelties"

Final Painting "Sunday Morning with Shelties"

"A Gathering of Old Friends"

"Alfred on his Farm with Friends"

"Khaya and Sascha "


"A Lifetime of Animals"




                                       







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. 




"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. 

"Armchair Blues"

This is my most recent painting. The inspiration for it came from multiple sources as is the case with most of my paintings. As you all know by now, I am a big advocate for adopting shelter dogs. The before and after photos are among the things I like best about the dog rescue world. So in the first photo you see a skinny, sad, mangy dog on a concrete floor or tied to an outdoor dog house in a dirt yard. Then the second photo shows the same dog looking well fed, happy and relaxed on a comfy couch in someone's living room. A few months ago I discovered there is a little company that produces piano music especially to calm the nerves of stressed dogs. I downloaded some for my two, and oddly they did seem to enjoy it. One of my favorite Italian Renaissance painters is Fra Angelico. Lately I have been looking at his interesting and often dissonant color palettes, which influenced the yellow and blues in this painting. And lastly the title... there is a great tune that Ray Charles performed called the "Rockin Chair Blues".  It is the perfect music for this painting but since the dogs are in armchairs, not rocking chairs, (that would be tricky), I changed the title a little.
And I also need to thank Ellie, of Two Blockheads fame, for letting me use her photo for the dog in the striped chair.

                                "Armchair Blues, oil on linen, 36" x 48"
                     

Here are some links you might like:

Music to calm dogs:  http://throughadogsear.com/
Two Blockheads:  https://www.facebook.com/TwoBlockheads
Rockin' Chair Blues:
Remdog and Loulou enjoying some tunes:





Bugfire

I finished this painting earlier this summer. It is inspired by a book by the same name, "Bugfire" written by the author Jean Heilprin Diehl. The setting for the painting is the Amazon Littlebee House on Block Island, RI. Last summer I was walking by the house and someone was trimming the magnificent hedge that surrounds the property. When I passed by again, I saw that they had made the opening in the hedge into a heart. Jean's novel is about an adolescent girl who is facing some challenges in her family life and finds enlightenment by helping a younger child whose personal challenges are greater than her own. I see the opening in the hedge as sort of a window to the luminosity of the spirit and the fireflies as real and allegorical flickers of light against the impending gloom of dusk on a heavy summer evening. One of my art students, beautiful Caroline, was kind enough to model for the figure. To know why the title of the book, and the painting is "Bugfire" you will have to read the novel when it is published. It is wonderful.
The painting is oil on canvas, 36" x 36"

The First Mate

I finished this painting last Friday.
In August we spent a week, or almost a week because of Hurricane Irene, on a lake in the Berkshires. It was a very quiet lake with only a few canoes or kayaks gliding in and out of the coves. A man lived in the cabin next to ours. Every couple of hours he would come out of his cabin and get in his canoe with his dog. The dog would move gracefully to the front of the canoe and stand looking straight out with his legs up on the bow like a proud masthead. The man would then paddle him the full length of the lake and into the marshes beyond. One day we were out in our kayaks and paddled close to the dog in the canoe and the man told us his story. He had adopted the dog from a very rough urban kill shelter. The dog had been returned previously by three foster homes because he was aggressive. He had a number of scars from the fights and abuse he had suffered. The man adopted him and brought him to his home on the lake where he could live quietly and unthreatened. The canoe outings soon became the focus of the dog's (and the man's) day. The dog waited at the door of the cabin patiently until the man made a move as if it was time for a paddle. Then he would run to the dock and take his place. A magical relationship had formed for both of them. It was hard to imagine him as an aggressive dog, as we saw him gliding calmly, smoothly, elegantly across the lake, in his canoe with his man paddling soundlessly behind him.

Water Music-A Mermaid's Lullaby

I just finished this painting and it left today in a truck to Studio E Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens. My studio is very empty now. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to paint larger and wonderful to know that someone has space in their lives for a big painting. It feels like suddenly being able to take a deep breath of fresh air. Like my last painting, "Blues for Dogs", "Water Music" involves an interior/exterior space with one merging into the other. The idea of a "floating room" has intrigued me for some time, and I have done sketches considering this concept, but this is the first painting where I have actually explored it fully. I plan to do more with it. The title "Water Music" comes from the suites composed by Handel which were first played by musicians on a barge on the River Thames for King George I and his close friends. The story goes that the barge moved along with the tide, and the King liked the music so much he asked the musicians to play it three times. In this "Water Music" the sound coming from the piano is so beautiful it is drawing creatures from the sea to come and listen. For the mermaid, it is a lullaby.

Blues for Dogs

Here are two images of a painting I just finished. The first one is in process and the second image is the finished painting.

 It is titled "Blues for Dogs" and is oil on linen, 36" x 48". It will be in my upcoming show at the Marin-Price Galleries in Bethesda, Maryland. The show will be comprised of landscapes with figures, inspired by Block Island, as well as interiors with single female figures. "Blues for Dogs" is sort of the linking painting between these two groups.

The painting was inspired by a Piero della Francesco fresco- a reproduction of which, has been pinned to my studio wall since 1983.

And yes that is my dog, Rembrandt, sitting in the first archway on the left.

The show opens March 3rd.

Portrait of a Family

This is a portrait I finished recently for a family in Ridgewood, New Jersey. I used the repetition of a triangle, referencing the shape in the roof of the house in the composition of the three figures. This is a device often seen in Early Renaissance panel paintings and frescoes which anchors the figures to the foreground while creating a connection and harmony between the foreground and the background of the painting.