Daniel Freaker
Daniel Freaker received his MFA from the Slade School of Art in London in 2000, where he explored the painterly qualities of print, video, film and photography and his paintings are reminiscent of film scenes and fragments of a broader narrative. Since studying, his work has evolved through lecturing in the U.K. and internationally, including Chichester College, University of Bath, the British Museum in London, Dae Won University in Korea and The Meera Gallery in Pune, India.
Could you tell us more about your background and how you began creating art?
I studied graphics and electronic media, in London in the 90’s. It was a really exciting time and there was a strong movement in the art world with video and new forms of electronic expression. I was caught by the conceptual debates at the time and went on to do an MA in fine art and history and theory of art, but I was always interested in the similarities between cinema and painting. Since then I made a living designing mostly for web pages and also teaching art and design, which gave me a huge opportunity to be highly experimental across all sorts of media, but it was painting and its immediacy and sense of risk that caught me.
What does your art aim to say to your viewers?
My upbringing was really alternative and there was a strong educational emphasis on how we behave, feel and cope as people. These questions persist in my work, where the image of people in an environment enable the viewer to explore their own feelings about these images, that often remind them of their own personal experiences. The paint enables the audience to viscerally participate in the experience of the subjects in the paintings, where the marks and the paint provide a connection to people’s own upbringing and rights of passage that have formed them.
Can you tell us about the process of creating your work? What is your daily routine when working?
My practice balances structure and chaos. The structure comes from having a strong routine of working early in the morning from about 5am. I feel that when I wake I can take greater risks with the work and feel less precious about it, which allows me to explore new ways of painting. The chaos comes from the challenges and tension that I feel the work needs. For example, I lay intense contrasting colours down as the ground to work on and it is a battle to then work on. Other uncontrollable aspects come from the liquidity of paint that I use, where I can’t be precise or controlling of what happens. I think this tension is integral to the experience of the audience. I really try in each new work to challenge myself to find a new technique or process and build a more sensitive visual vocabulary.
What is the essential element in your work?
While the colours are often bright and beautiful, there is an underlying sense of exploring the human condition within the work. The narratives of the characters within the work are not perfect or idyllic in any way. Much like people are always searching for meaning, peace and connection, the paintings try to support those journeys the audience has.
In your opinion, what role does the artist have in society?
I wouldn’t like to define what an artist is or does. I think the term artist is fluid and shifting, especially in a practice that is self-reflective in many ways and is critical of what it is and does. I see many parallels between film, literature and figurative art that provide spaces for focusing attention on powerful and meaningful aspects of our lives we can easily neglect or understand very little about.
