How has your imagery shifted in the past five or so years?

For a long time, my paintings developed the theme of dislocation amid fairly traditional landscape and portraiture. Landmarks moved into other landscapes or didn’t appear where they should, while landscapes and protagonists themselves were in the wrong place. Strange bedfellows populated my paintings as a result of my shifting tactics of composition.

Examples of the dislocations I’m talking about included Gulliver the hyperbolic misfit; a suspiciously malleable Gumby; a mendacious Pinocchio; a shark that swallowed villages, sleeping pigs, impossibly long legs, misplaced or disappearing body parts, makeshift juries of chatting women on balconies, and the like..

Letting such images “appear” as I did gave them a sense of arriving as if they come into the paintings’ pictorial spaces as travelers. These were all protagonists who existed in a limbo between fantasy and reality. Today, instead of characters culled from art history, literature, or pop culture, I’m painting creatures I’ve never seen before.

Changing the protagonists that way also comes with a change in my attitude toward them: where the wonderment is, and where the humor is. I used to look for the sublime in the ridiculous. Now I try to find the ridiculous in the sublime.

Tell me about your process. Do you make studies for your paintings?

I don’t make studies for my paintings, because my painting process has always been exploratory. In the past I often painted over old paintings while retaining certain areas to get me going. Or sometimes I would wipe out an entire day’s work until the underpainting remained on a canvas, and then images from the painting I had obliterated would peek out.

The pandemic made my process even more open-ended. Maybe because being cooped up during the lockdown made me crave the natural world, a range of odd creatures appeared in my paintings at that time. They connected with one another in unexpected ways. These odd creatures could be both scary and cuddly. They sometimes licked, sucked or breathed on each other. They did all the things we were no longer allowed to do during Covid.

Of course, I recognized that this fantasy of interaction with the natural world could be a source of infection too, so these are scenes of intimacy that we desire but also fear.

I should emphasize that in these new paintings, I didn’t start with pre-determined imagery. What happened instead is that I set an oil-primed linen canvas flat on the floor and poured turpentine-ridden oil paint on it. I let these colored paint puddles dry for four or five days and eventually, I nudged forth the imagery that the dried oil spills suggested. You could even say that I was (and still am) polluting color field paintings by bringing forward the imagery I saw in them. I enjoyed the irreverence of allowing paintings that were fundamentally abstract to nibble around the edges of figuration. Instead of using abstraction as a process of reduction, I was using it as a process of recognition.

Five years later I’m still beginning paintings by pouring washes of oil paint on canvas, letting them dry, and coaxing snippets of figuration out of the painterly swill.

Were you a kid that made art? What, if any, art did you look at growing up?

As a kid, I remember my fascination with the simultaneous images in Tchelitchew’s “Hide and Seek” at The Museum of Modern Art. Later, being pretty maudlin as a teenager, I felt connected to artists like Francis Bacon, and to movies like Midnight Cowboy, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

In art school, when I fell in love with the incredible versatility of paint, I couldn’t stop looking at Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Lucian Freud, Philip Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Alice Neel, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Balthus, Tom Wesselman. And of course Pontormo, Bonnard, El Greco, Goya, Manet, Matisse, Soutine, Tintoretto, Van Gogh, etc…

How long do you work on your paintings? How do you know when you are done?

For me, there are often different stopping points. I’m always waiting for that “ah-ha” moment. On the other hand, sometimes I am sure that I’ve unearthed what it needs to be, only to find out later that it no longer works for me. 100 years ago the philosopher R.G. Collingwood talked about his parents, who were artists, declaring a painting finished when they couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.

One thing that complicates the stopping point is that I’m used to really wrestling with my paintings and repainting them. This was when I used juicy thick paint. I’d paint over things innumerable times. I loved attacking old paintings and making them unrecognizable. Sadly, these new pieces are so different. Their amorphous expanses are so delicate and every move I make is a huge commitment because, once I make a mark, I can never get the surface back to what it was.

When you think of the process from blank canvas to finished painting, is there one step or one action that you dread the most?

I dread the initial pouring. I wear an uncomfortable mask because I use a lot of turpentine, and the turpentine fumes aren’t good for you. I also know that everything depends on how these pours interact which, needless to say, I have no way of controlling.

The artist/gallerist Andrea Champlain wrote in a press release for a show I had with her that “The way Friedman brings imagery out of the murk - its ‘surfacing’ - suggests a psychological undercurrent, the constant thrum of repressed anxiety, both individual and collective.” I agree with her and I love the way she said that. I think there is something incredibly anxious, even anguished, happening when I start these. Eventually, I just give up and flee my studio until the next morning when I peek in to check how they’re starting to dry.

What books have you read recently that have informed your work in some way?

I’m often engaged at the same time with a novel or memoir on one side and a book about art on the other. Which ones inform my painting the most? Hard to say. It’s probably all in there.

Fiction or memoir that I have read in the past six months include Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Mendelson’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, Elena Ferrante In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, Percival Everett’s James, and two books by Danzy Senna: Colored Television and Caucasia. I should also mention Jill Ciment’s Consent and Miranda July’s All Fours.

Then there are the books about art: Faux Pas by Amy Sillman and Art is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night by Jerry Saltz. I just started Jennifer L. Roberts’ Contact: Art and the Pull of the Print, which is great so far.

And I didn’t mention Proust’s Letters to his Neighbor (translated by Lydia Davis), which is sitting on my bedside table. I’m craving some time to dig into that.

As I said, those books are probably all in there somewhere. But if I were to name things I have read that specifically inform this present body of work, there are a few that feel especially relevant. There’s Yoko Tawada, The Bridegroom was a Dog; there are the short stories of Leonora Carrington – and I don’t want to overlook In the Eye of the Wild. That’s a memoir by Nastassja Martin, an anthropologist, about the strange bond that she formed with the bear that attacked her.

Which artists do you turn to for inspiration?

Now that is a very eclectic mix too, with some of the artists on the list long dead and other ones very much alive (mostly painters but not only them). I am always looking at art. If I were to give you a very partial, selective list, it would include Goya, Manet, Lisa Yuskavage, David Hammons, Mary Heilmann, Carroll Dunham, Tala Madani, Gerhard Richter, Maria Lassnig, Kara Walker,Lisa Sanditz, Pipilotti Rist’s massive video installation at MOMA and her tiny one at PS1, Katharina Fritsch, Gillian Wearing’s “confessional” pieces, Leon Golub’s last paintings at Feldman, Thomas Nozkowski, Kerry James Marshall,Dana Schutz, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s little paintings at the Swiss Institute, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s first show at the Studio Museum.

What are you working on now?

I’m continuing to work on paintings that are similar to those that began life during the pandemic. I still enter into a ritualized process of making a color field painting by laying a canvas on the floor and pouring pools of thinned oil paint onto the taut linen. I’m still very attached to the dynamic process in which an image slowly becomes evident, much as a piece of exposed photographic paper does in the developer. I still love finding what is suggested by the drying oil spills and clots of paint that drop out of the cans I pour with. All that is the same.

I suppose what has changed is that I try to intervene even less than I used to. People say about chaotic systems that a small early intervention can have the a momentous effect. I do bring certain features forward but in a way that stays open. It’s important to me that the images remain mutable and the relationship between abstraction and representation remain unsettled.

I’ve also realized that these paintings could be much bigger than they were, and that they probably would be enhanced by being bigger, because, in a sense, they’re an allegory for the wildness of evolution.

Among other things, what is sublime is what is too much to take in at once. Nature is bigger than we can comprehend. Therefore, my paintings need to be bigger to evoke that incomprehensibility.

I’m exploring both possibilities right now. At Frosch & Co, my solo show “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” has several paintings that have barely been tampered with after their initial pours. While at the Pace University art gallery, I’m showing my biggest pieces from this series to date.