If you painted a portrait of artist Jon Friedman, he would be smiling. He always does. At least, it seems so during our two-and-a-half hour visit in his Truro studio. Well, why not smile? “Every day I feel incredibly lucky to have this life,” Friedman says. “I paint all the time. It’s pure play.”
But it sure doesn’t look like it. His portraits, landscapes and beach scenes are meticulous renderings. He’s an exacting painter, and that looks like hard work.
But he loves it. He thinks a moment about that smile I mentioned and then says, “I think I’m essentially a happy person.”
And probably would be so even if he was teaching philosophy in a congested, corner classroom instead of making art in a large, airy studio. He actually started out as a philosophy major at Princeton University in the ‘60s and received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1969 from the Ivy League school.
Although Princeton didn’t have a fine arts program, Friedman took advantage of the few drawing courses – life classes, which typically have nude models posing for the students. Eighty percent of the class were football players, he says, with the smile breaking into a grin and then a gentle laugh.
Everything about Friedman is gentle. He’s a compact man, slightly built with graying hair and inquisitive eyes and a smile that exudes warmth.
On this August day in his studio tucked neatly into the Truro woods, he is wearing gray jeans, a gray knit shirt and sandals. On the walls is a selection of his work. He also does sculpture and a few of those pieces take up minor positions. But it is his paintings that dominate the room. Although most are works in progress, they are scrupulously painted, and you can see how his talent for detail and precision is in everything he does.
With this kind of forte, it’s surprising he didn’t choose a career in art early on. While he was at Princeton, Friedman mostly painted on his own. He had taken art classes as a child and was encouraged in those pursuits. But he considered it an avocation. His father, Herbert Friedman, had an artistic leaning, but the Depression intervened and he ended up becoming an astrophysicist.
Jon Friedman grew up in Arlington,Virginia. Although he realized in his youth that he had “a certain flair” for art, it wasn’t until the end of his first year in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, that he knew he wanted to be an artist. “I felt (then) I had demonstrated to myself that I had something to say that was meaningful. I felt comfortable in that creative cauldron. ... I acquired a kind of confidence working in a visual language. And the work was exciting.”
During those days in the early ‘70s, he was a long-haired, bearded young man painting abstract work. He explored a wide range of styles and materials, which he is happy to show me. Turning on his laptop, he clicks through examples of his early works, which range from atmospheric paintings to strong, structured geometric works or clever combinations of the two approaches. He was pouring and spraying paint, “building up richly layered surfaces.” He would sand between the various stages, cut into a thick slab of paint, use stencils and build out structures in wood from the surface.
“I explored a lot of different vernaculars. I was doing a lot of materials’ experimentation and exploring the tactile qualities. That has continued to be important to me,” he says, looking around his studio at the work on the walls: studies for three portraits, beach scenes, an eight-foot-long canvas of the branches and blooms of a magnolia tree.
Gazing at the richness of this painting and its frenetic qualities and comparing it to his serene beach paintings, I comment that it has the feel of New York, where he has a home on the Upper West Side. So where is that magnolia tree, I ask. He laughs. “In Central Park.” In a subtle way, Friedman’s work is evocative of time and place.
He takes dozens of photographs and paints from them, letting the picture eventually “take on a life of its own.” So although the exquisite precision of his artworks have a photographic quality, they are not exactly realistic renderings.
Looking up from his laptop showing those early abstract works, which are complex combinations of various styles, he says, “I began to tire of the extremes. These paintings are much more calculated than what I do now.” He’s looking around at the current ones on the wall, which show a sharp departure from those earlier, more intellectual works.
In the late ‘70s, Friedman did some government-funded murals in public buildings, and in 1979 he spent a month on Ossabaw Island, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. “That was a turning point. The island was completely wild. I became acutely aware that the natural world was abundantly rich.” At the same time, he continues, “I felt I was repeating myself in my abstract work, that I had exhausted the veins I was pursuing.”
And he realized that “attending carefully and lovingly to nature would be a liberation.”
The transformation didn’t come overnight. “It took a while for the experience to percolate,” he says. And so he “oscillated between abstract and representational work.”
He was doing magazine and book illustrating in the early ‘80s because he wasn’t selling much of his studio work and thought at one point he would become a commercial illustrator. But success was not far off.
He came to his portrait work “serendipitously,” Friedman says. In the early ‘90s, patrons in the Midwest who had bought some of his landscapes asked him to do a family portrait, which took him a year to complete. Coincidentally, his father was writing a book on modern astronomy and cosmology, “The Astronomer’s Universe,” and asked him to do charcoal portraits of the scientists he was writing about. The drawings were published in the book and also exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington; they are now in the collection of Princeton University. From that beginning, he received a commission from Frank Press, president of the National Academy, to do his portrait. “From there it snowballed in a minor way,” Friedman says modestly.
His portraits stop you in your tracks. You can easily mistake them for photographs. But they are so much more. They tell a story; you begin to feel you know the person. Often he pictures his subjects in surroundings that indicate something about them: with a musical instrument or against a bookcase packed with books. You can see why the portraits have become his “bread and butter.” The ones he’s working on now are of a Southern jurist and an Israeli cellist. There are two studies each of the jurist and cellist. When they are finished they will go to the subjects to make a selection.
“I really enjoy doing these portraits, but I still feel like I’m on a steep learning curve. I’ve only been doing them for eight or nine years,” he says.
Friedman hopes to capture the personality and psychology of his subjects. He wants the portraits to be “incredibly penetrating.” The majority of them are of scientists and people in the medical field, he says. He’s also painted government officials. The portrait commissions often come from institutions. Therefore, painting them is a balancing act between Friedman's aesthetic sense and the need to please the subject – between his desire "to push the genre and explore it and the institution’s desire to adhere to coherence and tradition. I want to try to push them to innovate, and I’ve never done a portrait that I couldn’t stomach.”
He likes “engaging in the dialogue” with those who commission the work, to try to “subliminally move them” to be more creative in their approach. “You can’t say to them, ‘Your ideas are stuffy and conventional.’” So he shows them several concepts, which include something “a little less conventional,” which he explains to them can be “engaging and a much more memorable and dramatic portrait.”
Outside in the August sunlight are the gardens he and his wife, Joanne Barkin, grow. “I love having the garden outside the studio.” He finds the forms of the flowers “ravishing.” Against towering trees is an arrangement of red, orange and hot pink zinnias, gladiolas, cosmos, sunflowers and morning glories climbing high on stakes. There’s a hummingbird buzzing around a flower and a goldfinch nestled on another. Friedman points to them. He paints those flowers up close, often with a bee, butterfly or bird frozen in enchantment. “I like projecting myself into their domain,” he says.
His flowers speak of summer, hot and sensual. His beach scenes are cooler – moody and quiet. “I love the quality of the beach in winter, the solitude. It’s profound.” Some of his beaches are peopled with fishermen or a solitary observer. Others are stark with wide stretches of sand, dashing waves and vast skies with tumultuous clouds. Those clouds catch the light of a rising sun or the threat of an oncoming storm. A salt marsh glistens with color. Dune grass is speckled with light.
His paintings of forests have a magical quality. The bark of tree trunks is so deftly painted you have the impression that if you touched it you would feel the roughness.
“I love the visual density,” he says, referring to his intricate landscapes with arching branches forming a structure for the composition and foliage catching the color and light. “I like to create a space that you can wander through,” he says, whether it’s a vast stretch of sand and water or a dense forest, restless and mysterious.
Locally, Friedman’s work is exhibited at Tree’s Place in Orleans. He also shows at the Uptown Gallery in Manhattan and Perimeter Gallery in Chicago. He recently had an exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis. His work is in many corporate, university and museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Portrait Gallery and the Phillips Collection, all in Washington, D.C.
Friedman’s contemporary Truro residence is mostly taken up with his painting and sculpture studios and the space where his wife writes children’s books and freelance articles on politics and economics. She is also her husband’s “in-house second eye.”
From the deck, you have a distant view of Edward Hopper’s former home and a sliver of Cape Cod Bay. Separate from the studios and bedroom is a cottage with the couple’s kitchen, where they eat and watch Netflix films. An Obama poster hangs in the window.
Friedman and his wife bought the property twelve years ago, but the studio wasn’t completed until 2000. The couple spends most of the year there, going back to Manhattan for city life, to see their friends and go to the theater and museums.
But it seems Truro is where he finds inspiration for his landscapes and beach scenes and where he can have the solitude to work on the commanding portraits, whose subjects appear thoughtful and engaging. Although they are not always smiling, Friedman seems to be, content with this artist’s life, those glorious flowers and, now, returning to his studio to pick up one of the many dozens of paintbrushes that fill his world.
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