Kirby Fredendall is a contemporary landscape painter who creates original oil paintings on acid-washed tin and canvas that explore memory, light, and the emotional experience of place.
The images are derived from elements that she observes and then pulls apart and selectively reconfigures.
The viewer is gently led away from a directly observed image to one where a balance is struck between the known and the felt. The surface is organized into separate areas where one can experience the landscape as a vista across a body of water, as the transparency of light and objects seen beneath the water, and the combinations of light and color that play together among all of these views. The viewer can be drawn deep into the visual space or skate along the surface.
These shifting points of view enable her to selectively extract elements from the visual experience that most effectively convey a heightened awareness of the felt experience of the place.
The artist's goal is to capture the sublime, remembered landscape.
She does not try to capture a specific place but rather a mood. She transports the viewer to a place remembered by the use of subtle color combinations that are found in the landscape. The use of the acid-washed tin allows her to create a surface that feels "of" water over which she describes a water place. Place is not simply location. These serene landscapes allow a moment of beauty for the viewer - a communication with a landscape past seen or experienced. A connection to the watery earth that seems to be more and more elusive.
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As poet John O'Donnohue writes: "With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness."
These contemporary landscape paintings are developed in the studio through observation, abstraction, and material experimentation.
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​The work is exhibited nationally and held in private collections and represented by Candita Clayton Gallery, LAA Art Collective, Sarah Gormley Gallery, and Susanna Gold Art Advisory. The artist is based in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
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