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When I was a kid, I got a kick out of drawing pictures. I enjoyed carefully shading them to look realistic. I drew my first nude when I was nine. It was a terrific struggle. After two days of shading, my revisions had worn through the paper. Back to playing cowboys and Indians. My next attempt was in my first-year figure-drawing class at Pratt Institute. I was nineteen, working from a model, and I never looked back. For 32,000 years, artists have been depicting the human form, and it remains the mark to meet. I have recently published an account of my pinballing art career: Artiste: Memoirs and Meditations. Click the button below to get your copy today – Luxury-edition-paperback or Kindle.
Artworks
“FRED FOLSOM’S EPIC WORK OF REDEMPTION”
LAST CALL at the Shepherd Park Go-Go Bar, 234”x72,” oil on canvas.
“You write it,
I will read it.”
− Bill D
“A marvel.
Just brilliant!”
− Nancy A.
Artiste: Memoirs and Meditations
GET YOUR COPY TODAY!
The story of my pinball life and art career.
ART REVIEWS
He used to be one of them, and now, at 47, he has been painting them for 11 years. Seven of his Shepherd Park paintings went on view yesterday at the WPA, a magnificent, startling, wildly human, blessedly unironic, beautifully painted, utterly American show.
Present in these paintings, sharpening their sweetness, is a humming undertone of quiet criminality. Some sort of heavy dealing (gun business, or dope business, you don’t want to know) is going on in whispers back there by the bar. Folsom’s figures are not angels, those neon Blatz signs are not halos. The Park is not quite Heaven. These are sinners, after all.
In three days, the Dimock Gallery will dismantle Fred Folsom’s magnificent obsession. Too large to fit in his Takoma Park studio, it will be lifted from the wall at
George Washington University, rolled up and put away. With it will go the last four years of Folsom’s life.
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