There’s a quote from Spanish artist Joan Miró, written when he was 85 years old, sitting in the window at the entrance to City Gallery on Upper State Street: “I painted in a frenzy so that people will know I am alive, that I’m breathing, that I still have a few more places to go and I’m heading in new directions.”
“That’s how I felt,” said artist Roberta Freidman — whose exhibition, “Breathe: 2020,” is up now at City Gallery through Nov. 29. As the pandemic and its associated lockdown descended on the country and the social aspects of artistic life ground to a halt, “I could slink off into the studio and find some light in the day.”
Most of the pieces in the show have been made since the pandemic began, Friedman said; even some that were began before that “got painted over entirely” as she continued to work on them. Friedman’s studio is in her house. “I’ve always preferred it,” she said, to the alternative of having studio space elsewhere. As the pandemic progressed, she was even more glad for this preference. “I wouldn’t have gone during the pandemic” if her studio had been elsewhere, she said.
Finding The Light I and II.
Her City Gallery show was originally scheduled for the early spring, but Covid-19 closures delayed that. In retrospect, Friedman was okay with the delay.
“I had time to make it better,” she said, of the works in the show. “I had entire months to contemplate what I wanted to do.” Not every experiment worked; “sometimes I took perfectly good things and messed them up, and couldn’t retrieve them,” she said. But most pieces “benefited from the extra time.” In particular, she was able to get more comfortable with wax encaustic painting, a technique she had just started working with seriously when the pandemic started. The process involves first painting with hot wax, then covering the wax with a layer of clear shellac, and then applying a propane torch to the shellac while it’s still sticky to create a network of cracks on the surface of the image called crazing.
Crazed, detail.
Friedman found she could get “beautifully vibrant” colors with the wax, and the colors she used “were the brightest in March and April.” As time went on, she said, “I became more measured.” She had made each small piece with the intention of them being parts of a large whole, and as the whole project came together, “I needed places for the eye to rest.” The more “monotone” squares are also the most recent. The other pieces in the show are acrylic on canvas, “another way to layer paint,” she said — using not just brushes, but rollers and scrapers.
Inhale.
The narrative of Friedman’s work in putting together the pieces in “Breathe: 2020” falls easily into many people’s mental journeys during the pandemic, from a flurry of emotions at the outset to learning to settle into a new rhythm. She doesn’t shy away from the parallels. Working on the pieces was “immediately helpful,” she said, particularly the wax encaustic pieces, which let her work quickly in the manner of the Joan Miró quote. “You do it, it dries instantly, it’s done,” she said.
The pieces are “what I wanted to say right now,” Friedman said. They were “partly a reflection of being away from people and indoors.” Past projects focused on a subject — say, a trip to Cuba. “This is different than that. I wasn’t basing it on a place and time.” Pieces like those in “Breathe: 2020” are “all in your mind. It was ruminations in my head.”
The pandemic shows no sign of abating in the near future. If this particular artistic path was partly a response to current events, will Friedman continue on this path? Friedman thinks so; she hasn’t fully explored what she wants to do with this particular palette of colors, and the wax encaustic technique. She’s also enjoying working more abstractly. “It’s very freeing to envision color as a thing rather than a place,” she said.
“But don’t hold me to it,” she added. Circling back to the Miró quote, she said, “I have a lot to express, and a lot of techniques I want to try.”
“Breathe: 2020” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Nov. 29. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.