* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
James V. Freeman has built a substantial following for his Magic Realist oil paintings. He has had numerous solo shows, a solo museum show and has been in many juried exhibitions hosted by museums and arts organizations. Mr. Freeman has received numerous awards including Grand Prize in International Artist Magazine, inclusion in New American Paintings magazine (vol. 63) and Best in Show awards at several museums. In 2002 he was included in Doris Brandes’ book “Artists of the River Towns”, a survey of select artists living and working in communities along the Delaware River, published from New Hope, Pa.
James describes his work by saying, “My paintings are a combination of landscape and still-life, three dimensional looking places of dramatically charged form and color, drawing from biomorphic, naturalistic and landscape sources for inspiration. There is often a crisp architectural quality in the subjects and in the total composition. I create “environments” where aesthetic impulses that represent my deepest feelings and ideas converge to form a compelling, memorable landscape that, although wrought of my personal subjective visual language, manage to transfer their basic meaning upon the minds of others remarkably intact. There is no narrative or editorial; only a complex design of object/landscape, manufactured/organic, recruited and ordered with
intimate care in an atmosphere-rich picture plane. All of these tools I use to convey my haunted fascination with passage of time, psychological/spatial relativity, sensuality, natural process/decay, unending childhood zeal and a range of complex emotions.
These visions of intertwined landscapes and objects mesmerize with a playful distortion of scale by combining tiny, up-close objects with middle-ground and distant scenery. These images are composed largely from memory, luminous and dreamlike, in a way that is at once abstract and sculpturally realistic. The viewer often sees the abstract goal of the image before visually stepping into the spatial landscape.”
