Fred Valentine is an artist with a strong focus in painting and drawing. He enjoys and appreciates the invention, challenge, and discovery of making art in the hopes that this translates into a similar experience for his viewer. He moved to New York City in 1984 from Chicago after accepting a position as art teacher/therapist with an agency that serviced a population of children and adults with a wide range of psychiatric and developmental issues.

In the early 1990s he became part of a group of artists, activists, and organizers of guerrilla theater performance, happenings, and art exhibits in Williamsburg Brooklyn and Europe. Cats Head in Dublin, Ireland, was a multimedia spectacular that featured seventy-five artists from around the world. Cats Head Dublin spurred him and five others to form “Mustard” in Williamsburg in early 1993. Mustard was a multimedia space that featured spectacular events, with visual and sound performance often going on simultaneously. What it became was a combination of Bacchanalia, anarchy, social club, and creative space. After Mustard caught fire and closed, he soon joined forces with a partner from Mustard to create the art and performance Galapagos on North 6th Street in Williamsburg. The thought was to create a sensual and beautiful alternative to the typical art venue. Bringing in veteran and well-respected artists to do what they wished in a 2,000 square foot exhibition space brought much deserved attention to the lesser-known and overlooked artists that were his primary focus.

In the spring of 2011 he divided his studio and opened a gallery called Valentine. Valentine exhibits eight to nine shows a season with a combination of veteran, overlooked, and emerging artists often showing simultaneously. His goal is to create a venue devoid of the rigmarole of the traditional gallery system to give as many deserving artists as possible opportunities for unhindered creativity.

QUESTION:

“Memory seems to be an important component to your painting practice. You’ve painted landscapes from memory, and written on how the memories of seeing certain paintings have stayed with you forever. Can you talk about how memories are filtered into your paintings, both abstract and representational?”

ANSWER:

Grieving Father, 2013, 48 x 32 inches, oil on canvas

Memory has at times certainly been a part of my approach to making art along with humor, emotion and an attempt to squeeze some beauty and mystery in there. Memory and experience live side by side for a very brief time. I mean to say experience hands the ball to memory and the game is on. Growing up in an abusive and violently angry dysfunctional family leaves you with memories that never leave. They fade a bit but I still have the twitches and scars halfway into my sixth decade. It’s a kind of PTSD that is always there to remind me and it continues to inform my work. I’ve chosen or it has been thrust upon me to deal with that past and those memories with humor and art (I am lucky that way) without ignoring my emotions. It is a healthy approach when you can’t afford the therapist couch. When I was younger and someone would ask me “What makes you so dammed funny” my response was, “When I was little my mother would beat me while calling me names.” These emotional memories are less of a recall and more like something I can’t forget. They have in the past often played out in my work as addressing the darker side of the human experience or something like that.

Memory Painting, oil on canvas, 2015, 62 x 55 inches

For thirty plus years I worked with children and adults with a wide range of physical, mental, developmental and psychological impairments. Their conditions ranged from mild to severe and profound. There were plenty of violent and angry behaviors. I have often refer to them as the most fragile among us. Once again those times and people are less of a memory and more like something I don’t want to forget.

Currier Than I, 2013, 48 x 72 inches, oil on canvas

P.S.I admire the painting by Max Ernst, “The Angel of Hearth and Home” and it pops into my head often with its monstrous angel possibly fleeing or on the attack. I thought of it when making the painting “Currier than I”