Sam Friedman’s
Game of Painting
An in-depth profile of the rising New York-based artist.
Although only a 90-minute train ride north, the New York state municipality of Beacon is far removed from its high-energy counterpart: New York City. Its small population and natural surroundings create the ideal setting for fine art painter Sam Friedman, who grew up just 86 miles further north. In the city, Friedman worked odd jobs to survive while having struggled to find time to create his own works. Now upstate, the driven creative has finally found solace in his work and stability in his personal life.
Exiting a black van, Friedman bids us welcome and motions forward. The slick hair and button-down shirt he dons at art openings have been traded in for a plaid hunting cap, burnt orange shirt, camouflage cargo pants and Brooks running shoes spotted with flakes of paint. Stretching out his arm, he points at the house and garage: “This is it. This is my studio.”
A one-story family house paneled in white wood and a garage he painted with colorful abstract shapes appear as a customary place of residence. However, as Friedman shows us around the property, it becomes clear that it’s his ad hoc atelier. He guides us through both properties, relaying the bizarre ways in which he utilizes the familiar spaces found in a traditional American home.
In the living room, large canvases tower on top of a loveseat. Smaller pieces such as works on paper are placed callously all over the room. On one wall, a large bookshelf is filled with biographies, essays and photo books of notable artists like Claude Monet and Jean Michel-Basquiat. Separated from the extensive art library and tucked in a corner of the room is Richard Prince’s appropriated copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Friedman’s own hunting cap is not unlike the one worn by Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.
Inching towards the back section of the house, we come across the master bedroom where Friedman stores his larger paintings, stacked beside each other like tilting dominoes. These paintings are from past shows, including a few pieces that were intended to be on display at his most-recent exhibition “Flesh of the Gods” at Over The Influence in Hong Kong. In the bathroom, smaller works fill the tub to the brink, while art tools sit in the sink and other hardware are scattered across the floor and toilet seat.
We leave the house and head toward the garage, but loud, revving engine sounds bring us to a standstill. “He’s totally tearing up my neighbor's lawn,” Friedman says and laughs. A young kid from the neighborhood is driving a high-powered ATV with reckless abandon, leaving heavy tire tracks all around the lawn of the house next to Friedman’s. The artist tells us that there are plenty of outdoorsy kids in the area; he sometimes takes his own dirt bike for a spin around the nearby woodland trails. After conversing about his leisure activities, Friedman confesses that he became exhausted by working in the city. Instead, he wanted to immerse himself in the natural world.
“I’ve been in New York City my whole adult life since I was 18,” says Friedman. “Don't get me wrong, [New York City] had its charms for a long time, but eventually, it started to wear off. I’m really happy to have things like the sounds of bugs chirping at night if I turn the music off and be able to look up at the stars.”
We finally make our way inside the garage where Friedman has been working on some recent renovations. The majority of the garage mirrors the composition of the house; art tools are scattered across a long wooden table and tubs of paint follow neatly underneath. A smaller section is reserved for painting his works.
Sitting cross-legged now on the long wooden table, Friedman says he locked down a new space just 20 minutes north of his current studio in Beacon. “The main incentive for this new space is to be able to walk between my studio and my house on the same property,” he says. “Also, to be able to make large works, because it's got a 4000 square-foot studio with 12-foot ceilings. If it was up to me, I'd only make large paintings, but that's not very self-sustaining.”
For Friedman, paying homage to the great artists that came before him is integral to his work. “It's fun to play the game of painting. You can totally be an artist and try to completely reinvent the wheel, but I really enjoy kind of jumping in on painting as it is, as something that has existed long before me,” he says. “So, I guess what I mean by that is taking an approach that's already set up and hoping to add your own little tweak.”
Of course, Friedman didn’t find success overnight. He rose from a paradigmatic New York tale of art school drudgery and part-time jobs while also struggling to find time to create original artworks. One of those part-time jobs was working as a hotel doorman in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood to wedge his way into the fine art stage.
“That was great. It was like I had a steady paycheck and had a lot of downtime to draw. I was doing the overnight shift too,” he says of his doorman gig. “It didn't exhaust part of my brain that I felt like were more personal, like for making art. It gave me time to draw.”
After calling it quits as a doorman, Friedman looked for a job as an artist assistant while also taking on commercial projects on the side. One of his more notable undertakings was being the studio manager for KAWS for five to six years. He would gradually work fewer weekdays in KAWS’ Brooklyn studio as time moved on. This was somewhat of a blind indication that Friedman was ready to move to his own space. He didn’t realize it until KAWS gave him a “gentle nudge of encouragement” to drop his job as his studio manager and move on to work for himself.
“Good friend, good boss and honorable person,” he says of KAWS. “Being able to transition out of having a job that way, you know to gradually cut my hours down and then be able to quit and be told, ‘Hey, if you need a fallback like you can come work for me.’ It wasn't quite as scary as saying like, ‘Fuck, I'm going to pay this mortgage on my own just off of art. I'm going to keep health insurance.’”
With KAWS’ blessing, Friedman ventured out to his current dwelling upstate and his work followed. His earlier paintings displayed bold and sharp compositions which Friedman attributes to the hectic quality of living he’s experienced in the city. Meanwhile, his more recent works convey smoother lines, gradients and shapes that draw inspiration from the serene landscapes of Beacon. All of these abstract sceneries are comprised of carefully-maneuvered lines, geometric forms and painted on varying sized canvases.
“They are less jarring compositionally I think than some of the paintings from a few years ago,” says Friedman of his newer compositions. “I'd be hard pressed to be the one to pigeonhole how exactly that came to be, or it's definitely not like an intentional illustration of that feeling. But I mean, without getting too personal, I can just say that my life four years ago felt significantly more chaotic than my life does now.”
Now outside his studio, Friedman points to a fire pit and says he plans to light up some wood and kick back after we depart. The artist appears to truly embrace the confines of Beacon’s natural landscapes, content with establishing himself as a painter in what Manhattanites might consider a far-flung corner of the world. “It's just been a gradual negotiating process with the rest of the world to let me get lucky enough to go into my box and do what I want every morning,” he says with a shrug and a smirk.
By: Keith Estiler