The Conductor Painting

R. Freeland is a fine artist and designer living in Los Angeles, California. “My work is about human events and issues that are capsulated in art. In these works, what can be too vulgar to be uttered is a visual effort to lock in emotion or experience—and present the silenced.” _______________________________ I have always worked as an artist professionally from sixteen, commercially, and a practicing fine artist. After working my way through production to creative director in Nashville, Tennesee, I took time off to relocate and attend Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. At Art Center College of Design, I had the extraordinary good fortune to have guidance from world-class mentors, Stephen Prina, Jeremy Gilbert-Roth, Mike Kelly, and Uta Barth. During this time, I embraced art history and understood more about women's placement in the visual arts. I had never before questioned my role as a woman or contemplated that there would be any challenges at all, perhaps because to create visual art requires one to be in a mental space of real-time thought. It could not have been a grander education or experience. I graduated in 1990, earning my BFA with Distinction from Art Center College of Design. MFA The following semester I began at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, and committed to earning my Master's degree in Fine Arts. This time was extraordinarily challenging and rewarding. I met weekly with Connie Hatch and focused on my thesis show. I experimented with color saturation creating whole rooms of yellow jelly beans, for example. But ultimately, I still wondered about the history of women; what was missing? My thesis, Illustrated History of Women, was comprised of billboard-sized digitally printed canvases of alternate history. I morphed images of myself onto artifacts and imagery to create the "President of the United States," a picture of a business-suited professional woman behind the Oval Office desk. Other canvas portraited a Woman on the Moon or Hypatia in the Library of Alexandria. All works were created with photos and photoshop before the school had yet embraced digital art or computers. My thesis artwork exhibit, built on the computer to generate the fictitious narratives, and printed on canvas fabric by a billboard manufacturer, hung for a week in the school Gallery Two. I was awarded my MFA in 1993.