“In my luminescent multi-paneled oil paintings I try to find the grey area between traditional landscape painting and its abstraction into color fields.”
For nearly twenty years Douglass Freed made non-objective, grid structured paintings, and he began to see references to landscape in them. He literalized those references in oil vistas of horizons, clouds and bodies of water. The paintings consist of two or more vertical panels: usually one panel holds the landscape, and the adjacent panels are atmospheric voids carrying vestiges of it.
His roots lie in tonalism, color field painting and minimalism. By blending slowly from one hue to another, and keeping the surface free of texture, he builds illusions of light that invite the eye to linger.
Freed received his B.F.A. and M.A. from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. He has had more than sixty solo exhibitions, and his work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Arts Magazine, the New Art Examiner and New American Paintings. He has received grants from the Missouri Arts Council, Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts.
He directed the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art at State Fair Community College in Sedalia until 2008, helping build its collection from 200 objects to more than 800 and curating more than fifty exhibitions. He received the Missouri Arts Council’s Leadership in the Arts Award in 2007.