Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Jay Freedman.
Mark Jay, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
The art-making impulse hit me late. It came into my life in my mid-twenties while living in Haifa, Israel and has been with me ever since. Not to say art wasn’t always a part of my life, because it was. My parents and grandparents were patrons and supporters of the arts and creativity was encouraged when undertaking all endeavors.
After Israel was art school. The University of Arizona, where I had received a degree in Middle Eastern Studies, was where I began. After a year or so I transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute and received my BFA in painting. Then came NYC and Hunter College for my MFA, also in painting.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
For the viewer I offer aesthetic beauty and an opportunity to see the daily need for “natural” beauty in our lives. Upon closer inspection, what seem to be compositions born from an archeological dig within parts unknown, are really hybrid artforms that mimic artifact of a curious unknown civilization.
For me, it is twofold. First, I create through a series of decisions dictated only by the rigid standards of formal and color composition. Secondly, all of my artwork at its core explores the world of the in-between. In deaf culture I am known as a CODA, child of deaf adult. Both of my parents are deaf from birth and I am hearing. I have straddled two worlds, belonging to both but never fully part of either. This is at the core of who I am and the work will always reflect this experience. My current body of work boils down to fake artifacts that suggest something organic and sometimes practical but in reality they are brand new, fabricated, unnatural and useless other than for academic and aesthetic art presentation.
My 3-d elements are hand curated from excursions ranging from summer desert hikes, the beaches of New York, to the alleys of my neighborhood and placing myself in situations, where I find, born from decades of aesthetic training, an ability that allows me to constantly find the needles in a haystacks.
The majority my current body of work employs 2-d and 3-d elements that purposely blurs the line between painting and sculpture without physically combining the two. (CODA plays an obvious role here too).
If my work had to be categorized, I like the self-coined term- Maximal Minimalism or Minimal Maximalism depending upon the individual piece. Minimal in the sense of presenting one idea using a vocabulary to repeatedly discuss this idea. Maximal in regards to the quiet aesthetic and theoretical power contained within each piece.
The stereotype of a starving artist scares away many potentially talented artists from pursuing art – any advice or thoughts about how to deal with the financial concerns an aspiring artist might be concerned about?
Ha, the age old dilemma.
Ad Reinhardt wrote, “The one thing to say about art and life is that art is art and life is life, that art is not life and that life is not art.” It always is a mess when the two overlap. The only advice I have, to all true artists, is that the art will have to come out regardless, we have no choice. With that said, find a way to live the way you want and make the time for your creativity. It may be hard, but the alternative is worse.
And remember, the art and hardware store are not the only place to find your supplies. The world gives precious things for free if you know where to look.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
My first Arizona show in over a decade will happen next month at the Walter Gallery in Scottsdale. It will be a duo show with the amazing artist Lisa Von Hoffner. We have titled it “The Memphis Rainbow Parlor”.
I can be found on Instagram as markjayfreedman and I am happy to entertain all opportunities. Please contact me for art and all gallery/museum/retail collaborations markjayfreedman@gmail.com is the best way to contact me.
Support for an artist comes in many forms!
Contact Info:
- Website: markjayfreedman@gmail.com
- Phone: 9178652083
- Instagram: markjayfreedman (instagram)
- Facebook: Mark Freedman (facebook)
- Other: www.markjayfreedman.com
Image Credit:
Mark Jay Freedman
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