STATEMENT

Responding to everyday stresses, anxieties and wonder, Amy Freeman creates narrative imagery that embraces the use of self portraiture. By nature, she is an actress but is too apprehensive to perform on stage. Instead, the studio becomes her theater where she actively draws and paints from direct observation. Aided by wigs and the occasional costume, Freeman alters her appearance while laboring to best portray a desired emotion and endure any necessary discomforts to fully express it. Motivated by daydreams and guided by passions that play a daily tug of war, she visually integrates reality with a spectacle of childhood fantasy, creating a transition between the simplicity of long ago and the complexity of what exists now.

BIOGRAPHY

Traveling and moving a great deal throughout her life, Amy Freeman has made efforts to slow things down, create still memories and imagine farfetched alternatives to the real. As a child, she created outdoor dioramas with pinecones dressed as fisherman; she wore wonder woman underoos while spinning circles in the backyard and played dollhouse with ridiculously mundane scenarios for Barbie dolls with missing limbs. With age, Freeman secretly desired to act on stage but quickly discovered she was better at painting, which feels more sincere, complex and a little less mortifying.

Instead, Freeman performs in the privacy of her studio. She strikes poses, wears costumes, arranges small environments, paints or draws an object or scene and then obscures it by scraping it away. She works primarily from direct observation and holds each pose in front of a mirror or mirrors while painting so that she can accurately portray a particular emotion. There’s a struggle involved, a sense of impermanency and a love for painting with inaccuracy due to physical hindrance or exhaustion.

Freeman received her education from the University of Wyoming and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, BA and MFA respectively. She’s held numerous jobs that had everything and nothing to do with the arts, traveled extensively, painted in Italy and France and taught in Provence. Her artwork is in a number of private and public collections around the world and has been exhibited in the United States and France. Since 2002, she’s been a fulltime educator at both Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia and East Carolina University in North Carolina. Currently, Freeman is taking a break from teaching and working uninterrupted as a studio artist.