Micheal 'Fred' Frederick

I’ve known Michael 'Fred' Frederick for a year and eight months (not quite a year when this interview took place) and in that time, he has become a serious confidant of mine. A Dude on 'Dudes Night', left field on the softball team, and always down to hang (on the weekends) Fred and I have become very close. When you first meet him though, the explanation he has to give of himself is somewhat confusing.

FF: Consider for a second that, two of the main questions when you meet someone are ‘Where are you from?' especially if they know I'm not from Philly, and ‘What is your name?’ Both things get really annoying when they ask me. ‘Well I go by Fred but my name is actually Michael Frederick, but there were too many Michaels in my second grade class so people just started calling me Fred and it just stuck, I’ve gone by it ever since. I’m actually from Indiana. Indiana, Pennsylvania the county in Pennsylvania that shaped like the state of Indiana.’

I was interested in interviewing Fred not only to learn about his art process and how he views art itself, but also because of something he had said when I was first pitching the Art Vices idea to my friends. He had been working on some new paintings and said that I should interview him during these early stages because that's when he is the most pissed off and unhappy with his work. I soon realized that Fred has a very tumultuous relationship with art and to him every painting is a struggle where he seldom, if ever, wins.

At the time, Fred's studio was located at FLUX Space along with Shaun Baer and Dustin Metz, and shared a studio with Cheraya Esters and Jon Bobby Benjamin. On this fateful April day nearly one year ago we set out from my house with a bottle of Maker's Mark and a two-liter of ginger ale with our hearts set on finishing them both. After a minor delay (we had to turn around just after we left so I could fix a flat on my bicycle) we were in his studio in the hot, smelly, FLUX space building.

Originally born in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Fred moved to Indiana when he was six years old. After finishing high school he enrolled at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), studied abroad in Poland, and after six years, graduated with a bachelor's in studio art along with a bachelor's in art education. At the time of this interview, Fred had been living in a loft building at 5^th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue in North Philly for nearly a year and was working at the Olive Garden as a server.

TL: When did you know you wanted to study art, or art education? Why did you go with art education first?

FF: Um my orientation, like I said, I’m a townie at IUP. I went to high school there. So showed up to orientation like I fucking owned the place, cause like, I did. So I strolled in like ‘These guys miss their Moms. My mom is right down the street’. But we had to meet with the Dean of Fine Arts College and like with other professors to talk about our majors. In retrospect, I think it’s a good thing, I actually don’t regret any of it. He did like scare tactics, because a lot of people who go to art, who want to go to study art, they’re not necessarily serious about it, whatever. So he kinda put on the scare tactics to thin the crowd of people. He was like ‘Well art education, you’re like guaranteed a job, maybe this is really what you’re interested in’ and like painted a really bleak future for studio art, I think only so the people who were only really serious about it would stay. And I was like ‘Yeah I want a job’. I had been kind of on the fence anyway so I changed my major at orientation to art education. And then after the few years of being in classes and stuff, I was doing like, well. I had good relationships with the other kids who were in the BFA program. And my professors were telling me either to switch or to pursue both. And they kinda deter you from pursuing both because they wanna like, they’re trying to bang you out in four years. I’m glad I have both. I can go get a teaching job and make, you know, money.

Fred's interest in art began as a young child with Bob Ross.

FF: [Bob Ross] played a big part in the reason I like, I was way into him when I was a kid like, he's a big reason that I ever like stayed with shit and wanted to paint, and like I'm not gonna lie about that.

While in high school, where he describes the art program as 'fucking awesome', his artistic interests really took off.

TL: So you knew that you wanted to do a lot of art when you were like a sophomore.

FF: I really liked it, like I’ve always liked art, I always took all the elective classes and just made art on my own. What's awesome is art 2, 3, 4, and 5 taken by semester, you can end up taking art 5 twice if you do it every semester. By the time we took art 5 twice we had a full computer lab of like iMacs and you’d do like digital art. But you could all of, those which I did, you could also take 3-D art every semester so you could have two periods of art every semester which I did all through high school which was great. It was fucking great, yeah loved it.

TL: What was your art like in High school?

FF: My teacher, there’s a philosophy I mostly share but maybe not to the point that he does, but he was like really all about, essentially like ‘Learn the rules before you break them.’ So like all the shit in high school was like technical skill, technical ability, it was like realism like, beating into your head that like you, you know, when your just learning art, having a style like your own style, is like, I mean to an extent obviously you’re gonna have your own touch to everything but to an extent like having a style or a way you work is a hinderence. It's gonna keep you from learning other shit that could help you.

The building blocks for Fred's style were laid during his high school years when he was learning mostly technical ability and realism. Once in college he used what he had learned to start the evolution of his own unique processes and skills. The first step in this evolution was finding out what did not work for him.

FF: Um, well, its weird because for a really long time I did just—like most of my paintings in college were really boring. I would just try to make like a kind of interesting composition out of like a portrait, and they were really super boring. And then when I stopped like, or I would try to get too caught up in like portraying a concept. I think its really common especially when you’re in school and you’re fuckin like 20 to be like ‘Uh, this is like, I want to paint about how I hate the war!’ And you end up with like really bad stuff. At least I ended up with really bad stuff.

Two things that Fred found he enjoyed and excelled in were portrait painting and 'fucking around with composition'.

FF: For the longest time I only painted, I really liked doing figurative portraits, I just did portraits. Like through school that’s mostly what I painted. I’ve come to a point where I’ve gotten pretty good at it. But like, I know if its gonna be good within the first like 5 minutes of doing it.

TL: The portrait or the painting?

FF:The portrait in general. Like the face, if its going to be good. Like if I don’t get it right off the bat I should know by now to abandon it. Because instead if it doesn’t feel right off the bat and I put hours of work into it, then I’m just pretty pissed off...It is important to me to have like a body be proportional, for a face to be right like that shit’s like, like why else did I study the shit, you know what I mean?

One painting in particular that Fred made during his last year of college combined his portrait skills as well as his knack for somewhat uncomfortable compositions. This painting, titled Self-portrait On A Bicycle, turned out to be the most successful painting of his college career. This came as somewhat of a surprise because for this painting he did very little preparation and gave the whole idea very little thought.

FF: That painting I had stripped down to the bare fucking essentials. I cut myself off at the head and there was, again, it wasn’t like a solid color like there’s a few layers, its an interesting color in the back ground. [That] painting, like I’ve won all this shit for it but like I did not like, it's just because it was a weird, it's just my fucking face, its my own stupid fuckin face.

TL: So what is uh, what’s you’re ‘arting’ process. How do you form your ideas into paintings.

FF: Like right now… I mean I deal basically on the most basic explanational level. I have a bunch of shit that I think about all the time, shit that I think is cool, shit I like to read about, shit I like to look at, shit that’s neat. I’m really, I’ve been into looking at free climbing videos on youtube, you should do it. Dudes climbing fucked up things without ropes. There's this guy who does speed free climbing.

TL: I think I’ve seen that.

FF: Mother fucker climbs this like 1000 ft face, that’s like a crack. He climbs it without a rope in like 3 minutes. He’s like running up a wall. At one point he has to jump. At one he has to jump, leave the face of the cliff and catch a hold, without a fucking rope. Shit blows my mind. So like things, things, its kinda like I’m like a kid. Its like, there’s a revolutionary war drummer guy, I just read 1776 by David McCullough…that’s shit I think about.

TL: So it just like things that interest you, or things that are like mind-blowing. Like helicopters are like pretty weird.

FF: Planes resemble birds and they resemble nature. Helicopters resemble fucking nothing in nature. Actually, what, here’s a funny thing, that instead of that helicopter I was originally going to do, you ever see the Osprey? It was gonna be an Osprey but uh, I couldn’t get the internet to work in here. I didn’t want to leave it, I was like ready to work. I was like ‘That helicopter is cool enough’. But so eventually there will be an Osprey. Basically I sit here, I use that fucking iPod, I get on the internet, I fuckin go to flickr or google images and things I’m thinking about like I’ve been thinking about a helicopter and I found a picture I really like of a helicopter. Or I have like, I have this constant stash of, I really like images of like explorers like, you know, the first British Antarctic explorers, and people climbing Everest. And I just keep saving this stock of pictures that I really like that I can refer back to and use. I’ve really been into like a lot of these like modern war journalist pictures of like Taliban dudes of which there are some in here. I’ve always fucking loved space. I’ve been watching Planet Earth a lot and I’m like really into when great white sharks breech. I wanna be able to live through the first man on Mars. I wanna have a first moment. That shit’d be crazy it takes like six months or something to get to Mars.

TL: Does using the iPod make you feel illegitimate in any way?

FF: Not, not at all. I’m often surprised I fucking talk to people who have this weird thing that like, there’s a lot of people who consider using a reference image, cheating, like what they think art is is like ‘I walk in here with a blank fucking canvas in a blank fucking room and like, BAM, bust it out.’ But like I’m definitely into formalism, I’m definitely into figurative shit. Like I am, I’m obviously not trying to take a picture of it like I’m not trying to make it photo-realistic but like I do want it to represent things.

TL: So is art something that you think about a lot? Do you think, like when you’re you know, hangin out, or like, at the Olive Garden, are you like ‘Man, I got this really good idea’.

FF: Lets say I'm doing a fuckin 12 hour shift at the Olive Garden, I might be thinking a lot about a fucking snow leopard or something or whatever. I think a lot about it, and when whatever my mind leads me to be like, 'oh, now I'm thinking about my painting' and I'm thinking about shit I want to put in my painting, I'm gonna be like 'oh that fuckin snow leopard is sweet'. I thought about like great white sharks breaching for like 2 days straight, never in reference to putting it in a painting. I just thought about how fucking cool it was. Like 'They go the whole way out of the water, with a fucking seal in their mouths'. Then I was like 'alright well now I need to do a painting, what are things I want to put in it? Well, that fuckin shark, duh'.

Very early in college, Fred got a piece of advice that would change his work drastically in the years to come.

FF: We were being taught like very technically and traditionally, not necessarily traditionally, but technically how to paint in my painting 1 class and my professor recommended that rather than, say you're going to do a very full thick portrait painting where every inch of the canvas is going to be covered in paint, she recommended that rather than having white in the background, consider the end product, is it going to be mostly cool, or mostly warm. So say I’m going to have mostly blue-green type painting like most of mine end up being, she’s like ‘you should paint the canvas like a bright orange, the complementary color to that’. So mostly blue make it an orange background because even no matter how diligently you paint the canvas at some point there's going to be thin areas at some point there's going to be small gaps, and rather than having white show through, because like a complementary color it really fights with that color. So she was saying on like a really subtle scale. And so like I did that just like out of habit, and then I started leaving it more and more and like using it more and more like that and it's been like, I really liked the way it worked. That’s where it came from that’s why I do that to begin with. The problem now is like, is that…(Burp) If I , its gonna be, how do keep that from being a fucking gimmick? How do I keep that from being, ‘Oh well, this guy, he’s the one that leaves the orange in every fucking painting’.

After he graduated, Fred moved to Philadelphia. His first contact with the art scene here was at the Vox gallery. He had met the owner of the building and asked if it would be OK for him to put his art up in the hallway.

FF: I talked to everybody on the floor and I was like 'do you guys care if I put some of my work up in the hallway' and they were like 'no!' and like it's not, it's not that good of a feeling to put work up because people said you could. Its a good feeling to put work up because people said they want to. But regardless like, 'fuck it'. Before I moved here like 'why not? I will put my work up because people said I could', and I put up a bunch of my paintings [on] the floor above Vox which was like, for what it, you know, people go to vox. It was a big first Friday and a motherfuckload of people, and a lot of people saw my shit, and I heard a lot of good things and I felt great about the art scene in Philly.

However, being out of school, without deadlines, and without a studio space Fred's ambition for creating and showing his art began to wain. After his initial encounter with the art scene in Philly, he found it difficult to get his creative juices flowing. He moved into a studio the previous September thinking that would give him incentive to make new work. Unfortunately, it only gave him an incentive to work on minor drawings and projects like strengthening his easel. The only reason he was making art at the moment was because he had recently applied to be in a show.

TL: Does that really, does that like uh, knowing that you want to be in a show and like applying for it, and having the idea of applying for it, does that like put a fire in your ass, like get working on stuff?

FF: Yeah, I mean it should, theoretically it should, and right now it is. But in the past uh, the past few months there’s been like 5 shows and I’m like ‘yeah I gotta make new work for it, I gotta do it, I gotta do it’ and then I don’t. Or I’ve applied to a couple with old shit, like ‘whatever’. It's also been kind of a bitch honestly because I don’t have a car, because I’ve been wanting to work big...which is kind of an excuse I could just be like 'Steven, can you drive me to home depot?’ and shit but I never like you know,

TL: Don’t wanna?

FF: Yeah, any chance I have to make an excuse to not do something I’m going to do it.

TL: Yeah, right. Is that just kinda the way you do everything?

FF: More or less (laughter), more or less yeah. By ‘more or less’ I mean more and not less.

Art is a struggle for Fred. Not just in the sense that he finds it hard to get the materials to his studio or sometimes his ambition alludes him but also the struggle with the paintings themselves. For Self Portrait On A Bicycle, he spent very little time preparing or thinking about the end product and it turned out to be his most successful painting. Thinking about it too much and 'over-working' the paintings is a problem that Fred has made a conscious effort to overcome.

FF: But I like, at least in my last couple years, one of the big things I’ve been doing is I realized that looking back like in school there were like 12 paintings that I would have loved if I would have stopped doing anything to them but then you work them to death. Like it’s important to me to show that process. But, if right now I were like ‘I don’t like the way that looks’ and I paint over it and I start again, I lose that layer, you know what I mean?

TL: Wouldn’t you be able to tell if you painted over something else like that?

FF: Yeah, like if I were to successfully paint [the shark and rhino] out, I would have to start over, which I don’t want to do because there’s enough stuff I like about it that I’m willing to like, I guess, I guess I’m willing to fight with it to get it to an acceptable point.

TL: Haha, fight with your art.

FF: It is a fucking fight, it sucks. I obviously like doing it but its like a masochistic kind of thing. But again what I’ve been really into lately is I wanna keep what I did. I wanna keep the spontaneity and shit. And a big part of my shit is like I like to show the layers of work. I like to be like, ‘obviously the red layer is the first layer, the drawing is the second layer, adding color is the third layer, adding a few glazes and shit is going to be the fourth layer, then I’m going to do another drawing on top of it’ you know what I mean? I like to have the history of like, you can see 'well this was', I like being able to see the exact beginning. If you look in some of the orange where you can see the white through it, you see the beginning of the painting.

Fred explained to me that in his paintings, he likes to show the process to illustrate the fight that has taken place. For him a large part of this means correcting his mistakes but also letting the audience know that he is in now way perfect. It has become a balancing act; showing the process of the paintings while also trying to not over-think or over-work them. In order to combat this habit that had given him so much grief, Fred started drawing with pen and ink.

FF: I don’t like charcoal anymore, drawing with charcoal, or like pencil and shit and I started just drawing with dip pens in ink. And I started really liking it because of its permanence. You gotta either get it right the first time or if you correct yourself like you see the process. You know what I mean, like I have a lot of drawings I love where I would draw an entire limb in the wrong position and then correct it but then you see both of them. But uh, the other thing again is like I have a lot of shit is just one off, like its just like really serendipitous really lucky like, the drawing of the jeep that I just had unrolled. I didn’t labor over it like I said, I fucking busted it out and really liked it.

TL: But isn’t that what like, isn’t that kind of what art is? For some people? Its like you know, drawing completely in the moment and just like going for it and figuring it out and seeing what happens?

FF: Well yeah. And especially like, for these drawings, even if you really plan out what you’re going to do and really like put a lot of thought into it just, a lot of them suck. At least for me. Especially doing these drawings, I’ve done like 12. The only reason, the way it seems to work for me is the first one I do is fucking brilliant then I want to build on it. I’ve had professors tell me like ‘you have something good, you have to run with it, run with it, build on it’ And the first thing I do I’ll really like and then I’ll try to build on it or do more things with it, or even do it again, and it never happens again. They all fucking suck after that.

Fred also struggles with the question of 'Why?'. Why make art? What purpose does it serve in our society today?

FF:It's hard for me, its very hard for me because, I do struggle daily with the notion of why is this an important thing to do. Being a plumber, that's important. God knows the world need people to...

TL: Plumb.

FF: To plumb. Being aaaannnnyyyyy...like name a profession. Name one.

TL: Uhh

FF: Name a profession, do it.

TL: I can't even think of one...alright

FF: We can sit here for 10 minutes with blank tape. Name a profession.

TL: Uhh, metal worker.

FF: You need those! To make buildings, to weld things, to make the things that make our civilization run, to help the plumber out. I'm sure you need to weld shit when your plumbing sometimes, I don't know, but you need, you need that. You really need that shit. And even if you look, as much as I think politicians are useless in our current, like way we live, you need them, they need to be there, they need to be, they need to exist. One of my concerns with art is like, if you look at the history of art like, art is like intrinsically tied with religion initially and like that served a real purpose which was like to educate illiterate people on like the bible. To make things seem spiritual and supernatural in like a cathedral and like, the history of art is steeped in a reason for it. My problem now, which I do not solve, I buy right into and am definitely a part of is like, art now is made for artists. Like contemporary art, at least, and again I’m gonna make blanket statements that obviously have contradictions they obviously have exceptions, like I’m not tryin to be a pretentious douche talking about it, but like if you think about a lot of contemporary art, the only way you appreciate it is if you're educated in art. Like if you go to a gallery and there's a lot of shit that like, if you take, you know, like a dude fuckin...if you take a guy who is a mid-level employee at like LG, I dunno what he does, he does something, but if you take him into a contemporary art gallery and he sees, you know, an installation piece, he's gonna be like, 'What the fuck is this? This isn't art, I can't put this above my couch. I mean I could put this above my couch but I wouldn't wanna look at it.' I feel like so much contemporary art can only be appreciated by somebody who's been educated in art, they've taken art history courses, they've taken contemporary art courses, they've been educated in art. If they haven't been educated in it formally they're really interested in it because they're part of young culture in someway, where they research it, they read about it, they like it. You know they on some kind of edge of an avant-garde and like for that reason they can like something. I just think of one thing I saw at Vox which I thought was fuckin brilliant. It was a timed tennis practice gun that fires tennis balls firing at a gong, every 45 seconds. And like I thought that was hilarious, and I thought it was tongue-in-cheek, and I thought it was a brilliant as a piece of art, but like, if you bring some like fuckin soccer mom from Westchester in to Vox gallery to see that she's gonna be like, 'this is retarded.'

TL: Right.

FF: She's gonna be like, 'this is really dumb. Why did you bring me into the city to see this?'. I know that I like doing it, I know that even though I can't put my finger on it, even if sometimes I'm frustrated with with the purpose it now serves in society or whatever, I know that it serves one. I'm not discounting it in any sense, I'm just saying that it's not an easy relationship. Its not like I know why I do it, I know why I want to do it, I know why its important. It's more of a like, I struggle with why it is. I struggle with why it is but at the end of the day I know like, I know that it needs to happen. I know that like, a culture without the arts like, won't be good. You know? I know it plays an important role, but like I struggle with what it is now.

Although this is how Fred feels about art, his paintings seem to say, 'This is why'. They create a strange world where things we would never think of as existing together exist together.

FF: Everything is existing in the same place so obviously if you look at it, you think that they’re interacting and that’s all that it takes, is me to be like ‘these things are interacting here.’ It doesn’t matter how I think they’re interacting, anyone who looks at it can be like, ‘this is how they’re interacting.’ And I do look at how they could interact. Like 'that is weird because of this and this is weird because of that'. But I don’t have any kind of story. But what I think is cool is that if you looked at it long enough, if anyone cared to look at it, they could put some kind of , they could be like, ‘this is here with that because of this.’ And whether it’s anything I’ve ever though about or not, that’s interesting. So, I basically try to like, I build a narrative, I build a story that, loosely, I build the possibility of a story then I walk the fuck away from it.

I think the point of Fred's art is to get his audience to ask 'Why?'. There are space shuttles, crashed cars, and helicopters but there are also snow leopards, sharks, and humans all existing together in some kind of a parallel universe where the skies are bright orange or dark blue. Fred says he only learns about his technical abilities—what he can and can't do—while painting, but through this he gets the viewer looking at his paintings to open their imaginations and create a story or reasons why.

-Tim