Eric Freifeld

Eric Freifeld - ( 1919 - 1984 ) Eric Freifeld was born in 1919, in Saratov Russia. In 1924, after the death of his father, Eric, his sister Anna, and mother moved to Edmonton, Canada. He is a member of the (RCA) Royal Canadian Academy, and past Chairman of the Fine Arts Department of the Ontario College of Art. Eric's creative gifts, especially a deep passion for drawing, were evident since childhood, showing surprising command of form and anatomy as early as age 14. At age 17 Eric left school to devote full time to painting, supporting his venture with menial evening jobs. In 1937 he won a Canada-wide Carnegie Trust competition to attend the Banff Summer School of Fine Arts. The following year Eric set out for London, England. Enroute he visited art museums in Toronto, Montreal, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. While in London he enrolled in evening figure drawing classes at St.Martin's School of Art. During the day he painted London street scenes. Extraordinary developments marked this unique period in the nineteen year old Eric's artistic journey. A watercolour was accepted by the New English Art Club, to hang side by side with some famour painters. The prestigious Brooks Street Gallery invited Eric to hold a one-man exhibition. The gallery even provided financial assistance to enable Eric to stay in southern France to paint for the exhibition. The exhibition, held in February 1939, was a sellout and was critically acclaimed. Much attention bestowed on the young painter included a party thrown for him by Vincent Massey, then High Commissioner for Canada. With the threat of war in Europe, Eric returned to Edmonton. Despite difficult adjustments, he developed a desire for teaching and began classes for children and adults. A break came when noted conductor Arthur Benjamin, arranged for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. At age 22, Eric represented Alberta at the Conference of Canadian Artists in Kingston, held in June 1941 under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation, the National Gallery of Canada and Queen's University. From 1941 to 1946 Eric's activities were many. He served in the Canadian Army from '42 to '44, as artist on staff at the Canadian Camouflage School. He taught evening classes at the Vancouver School of Art. He assisted Jack Shadbolt in executing a large mural for the local United Services Centre. From '44 to '46 he studied at the Art Students League of New York. So impressed was the League's master teacher Robert Beverly Hale, with Eric's work, Hale asked Eric to teach his classes for a year while he went on sabbatical. Instead, in 1946, Eric took up a position of figure drawing and watercolour intructor at the Ontario College of Art. A period of intense creativity followed. It was the beginning of his passion for paiting abandoned exteriors and interiors that would continue for the next 30 years. Despite a seventeen month interruption because of bedridden tuberculosis, a time spent at the Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium, he still produced two outstanding drawings. Freifeld's peace of mind and productivity were greatly dependent on the ups and downs of his life. Marriage to Gladys Sumbling in 1957 gave birth to a daughter, Miriam. After release from the sanetorium, Eric resumed work at the College in the autumn of 1949. He began a series of highly structural, detailed paintings that earned him a prominent position among the Canadian painters of his generation. Noted critic Doris Shadbolt has written of these watercolours of sustained conceptual nature: "[They are] actually minutely intricate and rich carbon pencil drawings with colour playing an important but not crucial role... To look at one of these...epics is to become irresistably involved: with the proliferating detail, the sheer technical mastery, the evocative subject matter, the hypnotically weaving rhythms. His subjects which are steeped in intimate human history, have to do with abandonment, decay, faded glory, decadence... Texture and rhythm are the essential terms in which Freifeld perceives and realized these human situations; and the accumulated minutae which comprise them, while retaining their identity and object relevance, have a primary life as form. Lines, masses, planes, undulate and pulsate; surfaces corrugate, crust and shrivel; differences of scale and substance are swallowed up. To its value as factual and evocative information, details add that of a total consuming expressiveness. [This] painting involves us in a visual as well as psychological journey in time..." "In much of this," writes Ms.Shadbolt, "one is reminded of other twentieth century eccentrics. But Freifeld's real references are to be found among the northern Europeans from van Eyck, Schongauer, and Altdorfer, to Durer and Rembrandt." Eric Freifeld's career as teacher was no less distinguished than his achievement as a painter. Gerrit Verstraete, founder of the Drawing Society of Canada, was one of Eric's students during his studies at the Ontario College of Art from 1964 to 1968. "Eric Freifeld was probably the finest and most influential instructors I ever had," says Verstraete, "and I owe much of my passion for figure drawing to him." The basis of Freifeld's teaching is drawing. He fought to keep life drawing in the curriculum when it was threatened by more purely design-oriented pressures. Among Freifeld's students were renowned Canadian artists such as the cartoonist Duncan Mcpherson, illustrator Will Davies, animator Richard Williams, designer Chris Yaneff, sculptor William McElcheran, painters Tom LaPierre, John Newman, Ken Danby, John Gould, William Kurelek, Peter Harris, David Blackwood, Hugh MacKenzie, John Englis and John Labont-Smith. Some 25 one-man exhibitions took place in Eric's lifetime. His awards include five from the Canada Council, and his works are represented in collections of Brook Street Galleries, London, England; The Montreal Museum of Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the University of Toronto's Hart House, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Arthur Benjamin Collection, and private collections in Canada, England, United States, Israel, Australia, France, Switzerland, Austria and Ireland. Nevertheless, Eric's life was plagued by bouts of deep depression. In September 1984, at the age of 65, Eric ended his own life. In 1986, a posthumous retrospective exhibition was held in two successive galleries: the Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St.Catherines, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The exhibition was curated by the late Peter Harris, one of Eric's former students. Eric Freifeld is also the subject of an extensive and well-illustrated monograph by the noted critic Paul Duval ( Eric Freifeld, Paul Duval, The Yaneff Gallery, Toronto, London, 1977 ).