Denise Froehlich
2007 Biennial Talk
Run Time: 7:15
Always informing our practice of artistic form is our sense of the formality of creation. This ”sense” is not knowledge of the empirical or scientific sort. It does not tend toward any sort of description. It is the perfectly assimilated, perfectly forgotten knowledge by which all creatures live in their. Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle
Intuition, the familiar, and the ordinary are embodied in the nature of my work. I grew up on a farm in Somerset County, Maine, with an awareness of conservation, labor, and agrarian beauty. Because of this, I am sensitive to the people and places I know intimately that are connected to the farm and its landscape.
I always thought I would be a landscape painter, although I make photographs. Traditional painting themes and narratives are infused with intuition and the immediacy of the moment. A neo-pictorialist? Perhaps.
In Praying Mantis, the birth of a few hundred insects penetrates a moment in the garden.