David Alon Friedman

Biography

David Friedman has studied and created art throughout his life. His father was his first teacher, instilling in him a love of drawing and painting while still a young child.  Even then, he was always struck by the look of a painting before it was finished, when there was still a sense of the mystery of what would unfold. The imagination always seemed to be more engaged at that stage of a painting, when subtle changes in line, color and texture would trigger the imagination, create visual suggestions, and allow more possibilities for creative interaction with the viewer.

He has also been very involved with music throughout his life, studying piano quite seriously, and composing as well. When he went to college, it was to study music and philosophy, but a strong central chord pulled him back into visual art, and he received his BA in Studio Art from SUNY Albany in 1978.  After graduating, his music took him to NYC, where he worked as a musician and composer for modern dance, performing his music at venues including LaMama ETC, the Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, Roulette, Dance Theater Workshop, Merkin Concert Hall, The Public Theater, and in Europe at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark.  For many summers he worked as a musician/composer at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC and at Jacob's Pillow in MA. Throughout that time he never stopped drawing and painting. While working for a few years in the Dance Department at Connecticut College, he also took advantage of the opportunity to study Intaglio Printmaking.  Soon after that, he was at a crossroads – he decided to find some way of making a living where he could feel more secure financially, but still, have time to paint and make music.

In 1987, went back to school for software engineering at NYU, and began a career in computer software design, focusing on database architecture. Throughout those years, although he never stopped playing music, he also immersed himself more deeply in his artwork.  Having left the world of IT in 2020, he now dedicates his time to painting and composing.

Artist statement

When I paint, I try to find a way into a part of myself and the world around me that is constant, yet often elusive. When I find it, I know it. When I lose it, I know I've lost it. Painting is the work of searching again for what I know is there. Sometimes a painting goes through many incarnations, the surface being completely scraped away, images destroyed, then recreated. During this process, a point is reached where the painting captures a unified moment, where every area and event on the surface of the painting feels connected. It becomes a place where time stops, and one can enter. An object or place may be intimated by an emerging line, a partial shape, or by a juxtaposition of colors and textures, which are made complete in the viewer's mind's eye. There is a sense of random inevitability, which the observer makes whole, where clarity becomes possible. That same visual suggestion will be fulfilled differently in the psyche of every observer, each of whom brings to it a unique collection of experiences and observations, accumulated over a lifetime. The observer completes the image alone, as they need to, in order to make it right and whole for themselves, in order to become aware of his or her own presence at this moment.