WARNER FRIEDMAN
Born in 1935 and raised in New York City, Warner Friedman was the recipient of several awards for his artwork as a child, but started out his adult life as an engineer. After completing a Bachelor’s degree in engineering at Clarkson College in New York, he decided to enroll in art classes at night school at the Pratt Institute, while working as an engineer by day. Gradually, the attraction to art took hold, and he went on to full-time studies at Cooper Union, which at the time was the only full-scholarship college in the country dedicated solely to art, architecture and engineering.
Each of Friedman’s meticulously detailed natural scenes is framed at the forefront by some architectural structure, such as a window, a door, a fence, a balcony. A door opening to streaming morning light conveys a sense of possibility, while the view from a high balcony is lofty and regal, and the veranda of a coastal balcony is homey and comfortable. In each work, the sometimes-overlapping architectural forms play with the light source and create beautifully defined shapes, which contrast and at the same time complement the lush natural settings. As one art critic stated, “one doesn’t look at Warner Friedman’s paintings, one looks through them.”
ART NEWS REVIEW - Summer 2010
"The 2001 painting, The White Pine, made for a dramatic introduction to Warner Friedman’s trompe l’oeil landscapes. Rising to its full ten-foot height directly opposite the vaulting gallery entrance, the painting appeared to be tilting sharply away from the viewer until a closer approach revealed the optical illusion created by a raked view on a shaped canvas.Friedman, who trained as an engineer before enrolling in art at Cooper Union in 1957, frames each pristine, crisp, New England landscape with elements of a built environment that reinforce a sense of place.
In The White Pine, a minimalist Yankee porch—its columns alluding to the Federal era, as well as to classical antiquity which Friedman often quotes, engages with the flattened view of a scraggly but upright evergreen and its surrounding terrain in a way that suggests unity and disharmony at once. This house, after all, could well have been built with pinewood felled from the former forestland.Similar thoughts come to mind when taking in the artist’s other framing devices; house corners, barnyard gates, seawall fretwork, cemetery fences and rooftops. A storm-emptied beach is seen though an amputated section of a lifeguard station. These structural elements convey protection but also exclusion, shelter and segregation, cozy nearness and unsettling distance. These pictures embrace nature while controlling it; here are the refined geometries of a certain vision ultimately wanting to keep uncertainty at bay.The monumental, monochrome stretches of Friedman’s fragmented architecture are as finely painted as his realist scenery. They show abstraction seeking a place amid representation. Little wonder that Friedman includes the names LeWitt and Mondrian on tombstones in the half-imaginary New England graveyard of Civilization (2010)."
--Celia McGee ARTnews, Vol. 109 Number 7
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