Profile + photographs by Matt Moment

Kathryn Freeman, Hunting Season, 2024, oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches

In her enchanting narrative paintings, the Berkshires-based artist Kathryn Freeman imagines a world where people coexist with flora and fauna in moments of leisure and creativity. She dissolves the boundaries that delineate indoors and outdoors, presenting the alternate reality of her ideal: Humans relent to the will of the wilderness, inviting all manner of furry and flighted friends into their homes. For her first exhibition with Carrie Haddad Gallery, If These Walls Could Talk, Freeman incorporates the figure, landscape, and domestic spaces in dreamlike tableaux, vibrantly colored and composed in consonance with the Italian renaissance painters.
 

Kathryn Freeman, Living with Goats, 2023, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches

Freeman was raised in Danville, Virginia, a small city nestled at the state’s southmost border, where early in life she became both an artist and an admirer of animals. The latter quality can be attributed to her mother, who was so much an animal lover that she founded the adoption program at a nearby kill shelter. “The beginning of the program was pretty much… anybody on death row came to our house,” Freeman recalled; at various times in her youth, she lived among dogs, cats, horses, guinea pigs, birds, squirrels, moles, rabbits, and a “homeless pot-bellied pig.”

Meanwhile, Freeman found an artistic mentor in her uncle, Robert Jordan, a prolific painter of the American landscape who lectured on Edward Hopper. Jordan was the first in a string of mentors who encouraged Freeman to explore figuration at a time when abstract and conceptual art were far more fashionable. After her second year at Goucher, a women’s college where she was studying economics, Freeman spent the summer with her uncle in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, waitressing in the evening and training as a painter during the daytime. She discovered that, having lived in state for three months, she qualified for lower tuition at the University of New Hampshire, where she transferred to study painting under figurative artists Bruno Civitico, John Hatch, and Melvin Zabarsky. Civitico, a celebrated proponent of narrative figuration who had a particularly strong influence on Freeman, suggested that she apply to graduate school at Brooklyn College; there, she continued to develop her practice under the tutelage of Lennart Anderson and Philip Pearlstein.

Portrait of Kathryn Freeman in her studio by Matt Moment

In 1984, after living and painting in New York City for several years, Freeman had the opportunity to accompany her husband-to-be, the journalist Matthew Vita, as he traveled to Warsaw, Poland as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. In preparation for their departure, she and Vita were married — a necessary measure for the two to acquire their travel visas — and Freeman stocked up on art supplies, anticipating a dearth of materials in the Eastern Bloc. “He hit the ground running and I had to do my own thing,” she said. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Freeman explored the “very dark, very austere” city, writing and sketching for paintings that she would ship to her dealer, Peter Tatistcheff, back in New York City. This stint in communist Warsaw — where her fellow artists were censored, and thus used symbolism and allegory to surreptitiously intimate meaning — reinforced her longstanding belief in the expansive potential of painting the figure in narrative.

Kathryn Freeman, Stories for Foxes, 2024, oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches

Reflecting on the throughlines of her life as an artist, Freeman noted, “I always drew what I dreamed.” As in the experience of a dream, where one can take the absurd in stride, the humans of Freeman’s paintings maintain a nonchalant disposition in the face of extraordinary occurrences: A band of bears meanders through a baker’s kitchen as she kneads bread in “The Baker and the Bear,” a family of foxes cozies up beside a woman as she sketches on the sofa in “Stories for Foxes,” and heirloom tomatoes hover into the home of a napping woman in “Floating Heirlooms.” These magical happenings are apparently the norm. This notion is furthered by her use of setting, as the architecture of the living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms encourages reciprocity between humans and the natural world. In some places, exterior walls are missing entirely, allowing interior space to flow seamlessly into landscapes of verdant forests and humble mountains that are inspired by the artist’s surroundings in the Berkshires.

Enrapturing as they are, Freeman’s images function as more than spellbinding works of fiction; she poses very real questions about the disconnect between humankind and nature. “There’s the world as it is and the world as it should be,” Freeman opined. “We should be living with nature, not imposing ourselves on it; accepting it, letting it exist with us; observing it quietly, just letting it be around us.”

If These Walls Could Talk will be on view at Carrie Haddad Gallery from February 14 through April 6.