New Work by Deborah Freedman

Deborah Freedman, a NYC painter and printmaker, collaborated with Sue Oehme to publish her third series of prints at Oehme Graphics in January 2015. Deborah’s painterly sensibility translates beautifully into watercolor monotypes to create atmospheric landscape prints. This was her first winter visit to our beautiful mountain town, and the whiteness of our snow was an influence on her.

During her week at Oehme Graphics, Deborah Freedman expanded upon two former series, Imagined Possibilities and With or Without You, to create a new body of work entitled Every Breaking Wave. She made 22 variously sized horizontal landscapes  in order to reference what Deborah says her work has always been about: water.

Deborah picked right where she left off last time she visited Oehme Graphics in June. She works from a key plate, a drawing of a landscape with a horizon line, as she paints to suggest immense sky and land. Deborah will paint multiple vellums for a few hours before printing with Master Printer Sue Oehme. Sue proposes possibilities for rotation of vellums, hand printing, and plate sequence. Deborah says ” I feel ‘Sue and I’ got to another level of collaboration and I got to a more confident place with the vellum, watercolors, and ghosts. Good to be friends with ghosts!” Deborah’s playful approach to printmaking and good humor brought joy to the studio. We celebrated her project over dinner with local artists Diane Cionni, David Schaller, and Tibby Spear, as well as with a visit from Colorado Mountain College’s art appreciation students.

The smallest prints, measuring 18 1/2  x 26 inches and priced at $1,100, capture cosmic, luminescent qualities of color, texture and line. Three medium-sized prints, measuring 19 1/2 x 40 inches or 28 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches, gesturally invite the viewer into a romantic world of bright blues, muted pinks, and imagined greens.

As Deborah increases the scale of the images (30 1/2 x 52 inches), her pieces display a narrative about her immersive involvement in each watercolor vellum. The history of Deborah’s marks, which she made with various paint brushes, ink spreaders, rollers, and spray bottles, along with the use of ghost vellums, pull the images together into completed, multi-layered landscapes.  Priced at $2,900, these 12 large Every Breaking Wave prints demonstrate how a successful collaboration between an artist and master printer results in the unification of exploration and engaged sensibility.