CHROMATIC FANATIC - Nancy Freeman Studio

Become a Patron to enjoy colorful artwork and participate in the artistic process! I am currently focused on three digital projects, and two upcoming Pastel Projects:

1) Evolutionary Projects
With a background in science, I’ve always been fascinated by how the forces of nature produce random and infinite variations based on underlying structure. I use crowd-sourced decisions as the Force of Nature to guide the evolution of my work across various projects. Patreon is the ideal venue for this community-based approach to image creation. It lets me reach people who want to support creative efforts, and also want to join in the creative process, so we can build a community around the evolution of the work. The more Patrons can get involved in the process, the more powerful the community becomes as a force of artistic evolution.

The Evolutionary Projects use crowd-sourced "survival of the fittest" decisions to evolve generations of art, using a tournament-style competition. Patrons vote for their favorite cabbages, which I then transform into richly colored and textured artwork. My current focus is Whimsies, creatures that emerge from exploring symmetries in source images. The image strip below shows a source image - the ‘White Caps’ cabbage artwork, on the left - and three of the Whimsies that it produced.

"White Caps" cabbage artwork and some of it's Whimsies

To transform the Elimination Round winners into finished art, I use a variety of methods – digital painting, traditional painting, collaging, iPad apps, and so on. They’ll be optimized for on-screen viewing, but I’ll also adjust many of the finished works for optimal results as printed wall art.

This project is the successor to my last big digital evolution project, The Cabbage Art & Scarf Invitational on Kickstarter in 2014, a five-month adventure that culminated with the winning designs custom-printed on silk scarves. The image strip below shows some winning cabbage artwork from the Invitational.

2) Bring out the Shiny Things, and Others, Too

My Shiny Things art is all about things that play with light - glass and metal and water, reflections and refractions. Check out the "Copper Dreams" series for an example. This project has been accumulating many finished works that are as yet unseen by the world, so I will focus on sharing these pieces as I finalize them. Check out some images categories in the Shiny Things Portfolio

3) Bring the Past into the Present"

”Cherry Tree" 1993
I was one of the first artists in the world to use computers to make art, for my initial Evolution project in 1984: “Faces”. This was before the Internet, before personal computers, way back when computers could barely display color graphics, and prints were primitive and impermanent. Some of the original files no longer exist, and those that do exist are in formats that are not easily accessible.

In this project, I will try to recover and share these historical works, using original files when possible, and otherwise reconstructing the history (and the art??) by digitizing slides, magazine articles, VHS videos, and show catalogs. I have boxes of archived materials to go through, and Patreon support will make this possible. Early Work

TWO UPCOMING PASTEL PROJECTS:
Speed Painting

Speed painting is the most fun I have painting with pastels. (This is not the pre-choreographed and pre-practiced kind that pops up on the internet) The example set above was from ten paintings done in one sitting, two minutes each. Here is a video of that session, sped way up. "REAL SPEED PAINTING: 10 Two Minute Paintings"

Earth Alien Fantasy Forest
This project has been percolating for some time. It involves both pastels and computers, my two favorite media, and features both faces (of wacky wildlife, much more fun than human faces) and trees, my two favorite subjects. This will be the first project that will allow us to crossbreed some of the images, based on your selections. I expect we'll have a lot of fun with it.