ArtTalk – Kirby Fredendall

Kirby Fredendall paints mood as generated by her experience of the landscape. Her paintings are a visual record of her experience in nature. They are not about how the landscape looks as much as about how the landscape can make one feel.

Kirby is highly conscious of the section of landscape she chooses, pulling apart elements of the landscape and selectively reconfiguring them. 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 then experience the landscape as a vista across a body of water, as the transparency of light and objects seen beneath the water, and as 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.

Deborah Kostianovsky from InLiquid said of Kirby’s work, “It’s almost as if the artist was able to capture that elusive space between the physical landscape and the mental manifestations of being there; she packages up that tenuous space and serves it to us on canvas.”

Kirby Fredendall is an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely in the region, including at Phillips’ Mill Community Association. She earned a BA from Duke University. She attended Boston University’s British Art & Architecture Program in London (1987), and Duke University’s Renaissance Art & History Program in Florence (1986). View more at View more at www.kirbyfredendall.com.

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