Realistic landscape painter Linden Frederick has been comfortable with night since he was a young child growing up in a small rural town in upstate New York, population 600 or so, surrounded by extended family and friends. In 1929, his grandfather had purchased one of the 100-acre corners in the four-corners town of Perth. Frederick’s dad grew up there; Frederick and his five siblings grew up there; one brother still lives there.
Throughout his childhood, it was not unusual for Frederick and his friends to be moving like a pack from house to house, exploring their world, by night as well as by day. And for decades now he has been painting rural scenes caught in that apex between dusk and dawn, exploring light, landscape, and, most importantly, the human element that is at the heart of every one of his paintings.
Today, Frederick lives and works in Belfast, a comparative metropolis, on a quiet residential street with a new studio he has just built behind his house. In the old studio, he continues to design and build cellos, a “hobby” he undertook a few years ago. Often, he works on paintings during the day, instruments in the evening. It is something, he says, “he cannot ever imagine not doing.” Recently, he completed a prototype for a group of cellos he will make. There is in these both an edginess and a comfortable familiarity, just as there is in his paintings.
In snow, sunsets, trailers, old motels, a turquoise house, nocturnal waters, trees, highway rest stops, shadow and light in all manner of manifestation, there is always a juxtaposition of restlessness and stability, strength and fragility, mystery and beauty.
Working in two-year cycles, Frederick usually produces 12 oil paintings on Belgian linen for each new exhibition—most recently, Night Neighbors, in which all of the paintings are Belfast-based, and American Studies, for which he biked 4,280 miles across the country over nine weeks to make paintings like Hot Dogs and Traveling Salesman, Field Fire and Coal Train. Each painting is a square, often 40 inches by 40 inches, or 50 by 50, 60 by 60, a shape he has been attracted to for decades. The studies he creates for each are also square—8-inch or 10-inch, in black and white, and in color.
Prior to his education at Houghton College and Ontario College of Art and Design, with a year of study in Florence, Italy, Frederick had never been in a museum or a gallery, or contemplated the possibility of a career as an artist. “It was beyond what I knew,” he says.
Now with solo and group exhibitions, primarily on the East and West Coasts, Frederick is represented by Forum Gallery in New York City. He is the recipient of a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship. His paintings are held in private, corporate, and museum collections, including those of Unum, Sprint Corporation, and the Farnsworth Art Museum.
His next exhibition at Forum Gallery in New York City in fall 2012, is, simply, about the moon. There is, however, nothing simple about Frederick’s paintings as he continues to make the hard choices that create real work about a real world.
Your paintings capture the night. What is it about night?
It’s the mood I get—and I assume that other people get—at night or dusk that’s unique. You feel differently at noon than you would at midnight in the same place. I grew up in Perth, New York, population about 600. I can remember, the summer I was 14, I had a bunch of friends within a mile or two of my house. We walked around with sleeping bags and slept wherever we were. That might be in my tree house or on a friend’s front porch, maybe at another’s camp. I spent the night at home only once or twice a week.
Are all of your series based on real places?
Absolutely. I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for, but I know it when I see it. Recently I was in Aroostook County. Houlton. Presque Isle. I was hoping to get the full moon with potato blossoms, but there weren’t many blossoms and night in the country was pretty much black and white. What I found that compelled me was in the towns themselves.
I get a sense you love these places.
Not necessarily. I love the image. I love the feeling. I don’t have a particular fondness for a place.
I can’t help but note that although there are no people in your paintings, there’s always that sense of human beings, a human presence.
That’s conscious. What drives me is having a certain mood and that implies a human element, which a lot of landscape painting forgets. My work is not about place. It really is about people.
I feel as if you are starting to tell us a story and then you leave us to finish it.
I think inadvertently I’m setting some kind of stage so the drama can play out within the viewer. And that’s why people react.
How do you work? Do you take photographs?
I do. I take a lot of photographs. I take notes. I do sketches if I feel like it. It’s all a reminder to me, and then I leave things in, take things out, add things. It is the beginning of my idea, and then how I get there is a matter of logistics.
What’s your day-to-day?
I’m in the studio every day, Monday through Friday. That’s my job, and so I’m there. Woody Allen said that 90% of success is showing up. You show up. You work. Things get done.
Are all of these pieces [in the studio] for your show next year?
Yes, they are. Here’s a painting for that show—they are all about the moon—and this one’s not finished yet. Here are some studies for other paintings. I work on a number of things at the same time. I like variety. And it’s not just about painting a different painting. It’s about thinking and making in a different way. I think that’s why I love making the cellos, too. My hands, my head, my body—are all engaged in new ways.
In your paintings, you often have large expanses of sky. What does that do for you?
It’s a compositional element. It’s also a psychological element. For example, if this picture [shows a large painting in progress] had a narrow sky, it wouldn’t have that kind of…that bit of loneliness. The sky adds that. It also gives me a design element, almost an abstract element.
Your painting of light creates a visceral feeling for the viewer. Do you have that reaction as you’re making the work?
Actually, that’s at the beginning and at the end for me. But when I’m working on it, that’s just work.
How would you describe the influence of where you grew up on you as a painter and the lens you see the world through?
I was one of six children. My father was a carpenter. My childhood was very secure, very stable. One thing my parents did give us all is a sense that we could do anything we wanted to do or be. All we had to do was apply ourselves. I guess stability and freedom in my childhood were the biggest influences.
There’s stillness and unsettledness in your work.
It is an unsettled time. I’m capitalizing on that. I’m getting your attention. And mine. Why do we make paintings? Look at paintings? We get something out of it, or we don’t. And if not, we don’t do it. So I want to make sure I get something out of it, and the viewer does, too. I don’t know what each viewer will get, but what I want is a genuineness, which is harder than you would think it would be.
What are the biggest challenges in doing this work?
Every day is a challenge, just painting. It’s fun seeing it on a gallery wall, but it’s hard work between the beginning and those walls. Not as much hard work as joint compound, though [he says laughing, having just completed building his new studio].
