Under the Influence–Wistful Thinking with Fred Free

Tightly controlled randomness with a bouquet of wistfulness that tickles memories I didn't know I had—this is what draws me again and again to the work of Fred Free. But what is this wistfulness? It bombards me from many directions, like echoes in a canyon. Wistful is about more than old paper, which Fred Free uses in abundance. In this exercise, I set out to explore the whats and whys of Fred Free's brand of wistful.

I began with a somewhat reductive search for common denominators that might have something to do with the wistfulness in Fred Free's work. My list was brief, just enough to give me the courage to throw myself under his influence. In addition to using old papers, I would try to keep my backgrounds uncluttered, incorporate florals or other botanicals, use at least one technical reference, and avoid the space at the upper right hand corner of the piece as though it carried Ebola. I would scissor instead of rip. I would encourage just the right text snip to find my hand, and if I could stumble upon the word "free," an iconic device that is always used to good effect in Fred Free's work, all the better.

Here is a look at my worktable about two-thirds of the way through.

I made a little cheat-sheet of some of my favorite Fred Free pieces to help me along in my work. That's it on the right. My collage-in-progress is on the left.

Of course, fingering the practicalities of what might be called one's artistic DNA is the easy part. Still, I hoped that from this very basic collection of parts, in some alchemical triumph of transmutation, wisps of "wistful" would appear.

Well, they didn't. The base metals didn't go all gold on me. Instead I fell into a rather hellish vortex of anger, telling the story of a girl who tilted precariously backward while grasping her head between her hands because her self-absorbed smiling parents made her feel worthless and her heart was black and white just like her parents and just like her life but this girl found her way to technicolor eventually even though it was just in dreams as she soared off to meet that light in the (left-hand-corner-of-the) sky.

"Sweet Dreams," collage on cardboard

Wistful? Hardly.

And then it hit me. The power that speaks to me in Fred Free's' work is very much intertwined with Fred Free's capacity to view things in their true relationships. This probably influences his choice of elements, which, at least in some of my favorite pieces, use scale ranges gingerly and for maximum suggestive impact. What I discovered upon close examination of Fred Free's work is that it embraces the overview, like the scene from an airplane cruising at 30,000 feet. Within that perspective, there is room not only for “wistful” but for a wide array of emotions. As for me, in the piece I constructed while under Fred Free's influence, I was hovering so low emotionally that I might as well have been riding in a crop duster. No wonder there was no room for wistful in my vista. I wish this particular lightbulb had gone off earlier in the exercise.

And so I leave this experiment enriched, inspired, and with plenty of food for thought.Thanks, Fred Free, for letting me get my hands on your style while under the influence.

Please enjoy Fred Free's work here http://fredfree.com and here http://fredfree.tumblr.com and here http://flickr.com/photos/fredfree

And here are a few pieces to whet your appetite.

 

modifications noted, Fred Free 2013

free procedure, Fred Free 2013

bridge and crown, Fred Free and Random Cowboy collaboration 2013

 

nova lux, Fred Free 2013

who alone was, Fred Free 2013