a brief history of fred

self-portrait as an extra

my most embarrassing moment

my education and interests

some of my artwork

current work and bio

 

self-portrait as an extra in the last of the mohicans

I photoshopped my face into this scene as a way of introducing myself. I'm on the left, behind Wes Studi. I like to think of the guy on the other side as Dwight, and imagine that on the set we used to joke that his Indian name was Gay But Doesn't Know It Yet. Great times, I imagine we had. Dwight was a really cool guy, and a good sport about us kidding him.

my most embarrassing moment

When I was a baby my parents lived in a little apartment over a burger place, and put me in my playpen sometimes when their college friends came over. They'd sit around and have coffee, talking about politics and literature, telling stories and laughing in the next room. So I'd laugh too, standing in my pen, leaning on the side, trying to clap my hands together and not miss.

  Actually I was very hungry, my diaper was soaking wet and cold, but I was trying to be  pleasant and sociable. We were all laughing like this, having ourselves a time, when I suddenly realized they were laughing at me. They were pointing at me, and laughing even harder.

my education

I grew up in Bowling Green, Ky, and started college at W.K.U.where my parents taught languages I've never quite learned. German, and English. Horror director John Carpenter was my babysitter, and coincidentally I was obsessed with horror movies when I was a kid. That interest faded though, and persists only as a mental habit of comparing Hamlet to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and to everything else. My knowledge of horror is nothing compared to younger fans who grew up with video and dvd.

At W.K.U. I took drawing with Leo Fernandez, and briefly studied lute and classical guitar, but I'm too absent-minded to play anything very well. (Years later I wrote a utility patent for a kind of thumb- and finger-pick. It's a bit like inventing a better chopstick.) I met my wife Lynne at Western when I was seventeen, and we moved to Lexington. At U. of K. I took drawing with Bob Tharsing, and creative writing with Gurney Norman. I decided on art as a major but wasn't interested in painting. I transferred again, to Murray State University, because of the drawing program. I studied particularly with Dale Leys, and Steve Bishop, among others, completing a BFA

in 1986. I attended a year of graduate school in Oxford, MS, before moving to Richmond, VA, where Lynne finished an MFA in Theatre.

  Drawing as its own medium is an odd and in-between focus. It depends on appreciating qualities of directness, spontaneity, and whatever other unique qualities artists may bring to it. Mauricio Lazanski established the first graduate school in art, at  the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, in um, Iowa, and his powerful series The Nazi Drawings make a strong case for drawing as an independent medium. Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing seems to ask whether a work of art can succeed without calling much attention to itself, but it may also seem to beg that question by employing a shock tactic, and borrowing on the more established reputation and celebrity of de Kooning.

   Anyhow, whenever I tried to make my own work more substantial and ambitious I experienced the undesirable side-effect of hating it. Most of those attempts are gone, destroyed, or rolled up somewhere.

   For a while, after leaving grad school, I became interested in using art detritus as found objects--sketches, print proofs, orphaned student works, and I made some pieces in this vein before giving up on it. Using my own stuff became problematic once I began anticipating re-using it as a fragment, and using other people's work was uncomfortable in other ways. It never quite worked, but it probably expresses my main preoccupations as well as anything. I think my best work is simply small, insubstantial, ephemeral,  marginal and quixotic, or something, and that's that.

   Since then I've painted fairly straight portraits, usually of kids, and I've done some small drawings in wet gesso, sometimes using a "multiple support" device that was popular some years ago.

        

         

   As a kid I took hours of roadside landscapes out the car window on Super 8. And I've taken hundreds of photos while driving, thinking I was capturing amazing things. None of it made any sense when I looked at the film or photos later. Some of these drawings were attempts to get at that missing sense.

a couple of the junk art detritus collages

        

  I've also written some plays I've never quite been happy with, and the late James Still made some very generous remarks about one of my stories, in a letter to my Dad. And I can prove it.   

  I got to meet the painter Joe Downing in Paris, and he said he thought my piece "Horse Girls," below, was the best in the Jeune Peinture exhibit at the Grande Palais that year. I should have got that in writing. And notarized. It was a very nice thing to say.

  Dale Leys once compared the odd mixture of incredibly stupid elements and brilliance in my work to a dumb little dance he'd seen Dizzy Gillespie do between moments of inspired playing. It's much too generous, but I think there's maybe something to it, sometimes, and it was nice of him to say.

  I've also worked in the mediums of fortune cookies, digital photo miniatures, and more recently, Lolcats.*

  I'm currently focusing on a tabloid aesthetics journal, an illegitimate child of the Enquirer and the Poetics, called the Herald Sparrow. I live in Louisville with Lynne and our kids Jim and Marietta.

   *Lolcats are an internet phenomenon in which pictures (pics) of cats or pets are combined with captions indicating what the animals are "saying" or perhaps thinking. "Lol" (sic) is an contraction indicating Laughing Out Loud--a frequent or sought-after response to works in this medium.

   In Lolcat # 1, Scarface meets Lolcat I sought to juxtapose the seeming simplicity and innocence of our desires (as represented by a "cheezburger"*--a kind of cheezburger of paradise, if you will**) with the difficulties and ugliness (as represented by the career ladder advice in the movie Scarface) that so often seems to stand in the way.

*the cheezburger is believed to have originated at Kaelin's, in Louisville, Ky.

**see also James Buffet.