Today Cheap in Madrid is talking to Expat Philip B Freyder. This artist and translator hails from Omaha but has been living in Spain for over 30 years. He has exhibited here in Madrid, and his work is found in private collections in Spain, France, Germany, Mexico and the US. His drawings and paintings include figurative work and some abstract works. Examples of his art can be found here.

CiM: I noticed that you find a lot of the subjects of your art on the subway or in parks or out in public spaces.
PF: Yes, when I’m in restaurants, cafes, on the subway, on buses, I always carry around a drawing pad and some felt tip pens or pencils. It’s a little tricky because I don’t normally want people to be aware that I’m drawing them. I don’t want them to feel that I’m committing an intrusion.

CiM: Has anyone ever figured it out?
PF: Yes, and sometimes they act a bit uncomfortable. But that doesn’t happen very often. And sometimes they’re sort of amused. Little children who pick up on this will jump across the aisle and look over my shoulder to see what I’m doing, what I’m drawing. In one case a man became aware that I was drawing him. And I thought ok, I’ll finish the drawing and just hand it to him. So I got up as the subway reached my stop and handed him the drawing and smiled. I think he was pleased.

CiM: Why did you start drawing people in public places?
PF: I think it’s important for a painter to keep his hand in and to observe people. People are really my number one subject, the subject I like to look at the most. Drawing is continuous training for the eye. When you look at a subject that you’re drawing, you look at it again and again and again. And the whole activity forces you to know that subject much better than you would if you just gazed at it for a while or glanced at it. It’s a way of forcing close, concentrated knowledge of what you have in front of you; and it’s also a way of maintaining skill. When I’m not drawing with pencils or felt tip pens or whatever, I’m drawing with a paintbrush—even though I’m doing abstract work. It’s all one really. Learning to draw and maintaining your drawing skill is learning to see and maintaining your capacity to see. So I think it’s very important.

CiM: Tell us about the exhibitions you had here in Madrid.
PF: I did two in Madrid: one in 2003 at the Alliance Française and one in 2006 at a restaurant called León en Madrid which has now changed hands. I suppose my first solo exhibition really was at the Alliance Française. I got a lot of support from them: they paid for promotional postcards where they reproduced images of a couple of my paintings that were in the show; they lent me someone on their staff to help me hang the works and take them down when the exhibition was over; they organized and paid for a reception with a bit of wine and beer and finger food. The director of the Alliance Française stood up, said a few words and interviewed me briefly in front of the crowd, and I made a few remarks about what I was doing and what my painting was about. It was well attended and I enjoyed the whole thing. The show at the restaurant was much more commercial in nature. I rounded up friends and associates and invited them to have lunch with me and look over the paintings. I said, “Look, I don’t want to pressure you so if you want to come just to have the cocido maragato, that’s great.” At that time, this was a Leonese restaurant. So, I sold a bit out of both shows but I must say I had more fun at the Alliance Française show.CiM: What are your favorite museums and galleries in Madrid?
PF: We have 2 friends, another mixed marriage—she’s French and he’s Spanish. Almost without fail, every month we find a temporary exhibition and we go see it, and we discuss it and have lunch together, and see a film afterwards. That is what we call our cultural Saturdays. We go most frequently to the Thyssen-Bornemisza, which as you know organizes shows with the Caja Madrid Foundation. So the first half of the show will be in the Thyssen, and the second half you can go down and see at the Casa de las Alajas. Another place we like is the Mapfre Foundation on Paseo de la Castellana. They recently had an interesting Impressionist exhibit with works lent out from the Musée d’Orsay. Apart from that, I like to hit galleries in the area around the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (Juana de Aizpuru, Oliva Arauna…), as well as some galleries on calle Orfila, which runs parallel to Génova. The Soledad Lorenzo gallery is right at the forefront of Spanish art. And then there is the highly commercial but very good Marlborough gallery, which is right next door. The Cayón gallery, also on calle Orfila, recently had a show of the minimalist sculptures of Carl Andre. Not long ago we saw an exhibit at the Instituto Cervantes by Max, a fellow who’s a friend of my painting teacher Manuel Domingo Castellanos. He does illustrations and cartoons. He really has quite an interesting view of life and a very coherent style. So we enjoyed that. It was a totally different sort of exhibition than the kinds we normally go to.

CiM: Do you feel that your painting and drawing is influenced by Spanish tradition?
PF: I think inevitably. I’m a great admirer of Velazquez and Goya—particularly the black paintings of Goya, his etchings, the more personal work that wasn’t the stuff he did as a court painter. I would say Luis Feito, the Madrid-born abstract painter, probably influences me in ways that I’m not consciously aware of in my abstract work. But my most direct influences in the past years have been the German expressionist painters, the Die Brücke. I’m thinking of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and some of the Secessionist painters in Vienna; Egon Schiele, for example. And so a lot of my color is pretty expressionistic. It is pure emotion and almost pure color.

CiM: When did you start painting?
PF: I started when I was about three years old. My mother was a frustrated artist, who dabbled with oil and so forth, but never really did anything with it. She did accomplish things as a writer, she got published. She thought it would be cute to have her little boy put on a nice greasy plastic smock and spread fingerpaints around on big sheets of slick, white paper for lining shelves and drawers. Later, when I was old enough, she took me along to the preschool at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. It was all drawing and painting and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the teachers there was also a docent. I took several of her tours and found that all fantastic, really fascinating. It’s amazing what you find in the Omaha museum: we had a Goya, we had a Titian, we had a couple of Monets, we had one of Degas’s bronze ballerinas—there must have been 10 million copies of those. I continued taking classes at the Joslyn and eventually became an assistant in children’s art classes. I took adult painting and drawing workshops, where they would bring in painters like Marion John Kitzman and Robert Matthew Freimark. We did some interesting things there. That’s what kept me going as a painter. Unfortunately, when I told my parents I wanted to major in art, they freaked and said “You won’t get one red cent for a college education unless you take a more conventional major.” So I settled for a less useful major. I think with an art major I probably could have gone on to the MFA and probably taught at university. There is more room in the teaching profession at the college level for MFAs than for PhDs in English. English majors are a dime a dozen. But I enjoyed studying English. I took as many art courses as I could, but in the end, I decided this whole art thing was just an adolescent fantasy. I hung it up. I went along for years not making any art; writing some poetry but not getting published beyond college literary magazines. Then decades later in Madrid, my wife, who was a painter, found a studio called Cadmio, which is now on calle Duque de Sesto. The painter’s name is Manuel Domingo Castellanos and he’s a very good teacher. So she signed up for his courses and I eventually got roped in and discovered I could not deny my vocational attraction to art. It’s like a sickness, an addiction I couldn’t get rid of. I’ve been at Cadmio since 1989 and my only regret is that I can’t spend more than 2 mornings a week there.

CiM: How did you wind up in Madrid?
PF: I was born in Iowa and grew up in the great metropolis across the river of Omaha, Nebraska. Nice places to be out of. I think from the time I was 12 or 13 years old I realized that the world was much, much bigger than Omaha. I started studying Spanish at 12 or 13. While the other kids were listening to rock and roll, I was listening to el Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo, to Andrés Segovia, and to jazz. My gaze was set on Europe. My dream became to come to Europe, live here, and just explore. Years later when I was 35 or so I finally made the jump across the Atlantic. I had been teaching English in Boston and one of my students was a military engineer from Spain. We kept in touch and when I was in Spain a few months later he and his wife took me around the provinces of Burgos and La Rioja. He later contacted me when a post as an English teacher and translator opened up in the company his father-in-law worked in. So I landed in Pamplona in 1979, where I met my former wife. Both my wife and I were people who felt much happier in an urban setting. What we liked to do most of all was to take a weekend to go visit friends in Madrid, and see foreign films and art exhibitions, eat at good restaurants, go to the theatre—all the things that were difficult to do in Pamplona. So after 5 or 6 years in Pamplona, we moved to Madrid. So I’ve been here since 1985. Ana—my wife at that time whom I loved dearly—and I stayed together 14 years. She died of cancer, which we couldn’t stop. Years later I remarried. My current wife is one of the few Madrid natives.