Christopher Friesen, associate professor with UFV’s visual arts department, has just completed his latest exhibit, Silvery Tones. Inspired by the work of Camille Corot, Friesen’s work explores counterfeit art and uses a new medium — Instagram— to connect with his audience and show them his process from start to finish.
How did the exhibit come together?
I used to live in Abbotsford, and moved to Langley and downsized, so I needed to make a space for me to work, so I had to build a studio. Through this process, there was a number of different things that came together: I had a new studio, I had a new material, I had opportunity to really do research and it brought me to re-examine the work of Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. Through my sabbatical process, I literally had a year to really focus on what I wanted to do with the material and patent a number of different projects. One of the things was that I wanted to start using Instagram for something other than selfies or shots of my food and pets. I wanted to make it about my process.
How did Corot influence Silvery Tones?
I found out that he’s one of the most counterfeited painters on the planet because he was in that right place, right time where you had a newly minted wealthy class in America that wanted to buy European art and you couldn’t satisfy them in that sense. So it was this situation where Corot was independently wealthy and he didn’t have to go through the traditional gallery system, which this is, and he just painted. As a result, he helped students, he’d paint on students’ canvases, he’d sign his work, he’d lend out his work that could be copied, he’d do multiple versions of the same subject that led confusion about any original, and it made its way to North America. The quote goes that he painted 3,000 works in his life, 10,000 of which are in the United States. My project was also to change up how I worked with Corot, so I’m kind of counterfeiting Corot, but I’m using a contemporary way to paint, so that way if you did a comparison, you’d see there’s something operating differently, there’s a bit of a history of painting that exists. I keep the title though so that if you do a Google search of the image you’ll get one of my paintings alongside one of Corot’s paintings. It plays into this whole notion of counterfeit and what we value as knowledge. It asks the viewer to ask these questions, and like anything, you form your own opinions on these things and at the end of the day they’re paintings. It’s a physical thing in a physical world that you need to experience.
What was it about Instagram?
It’s a visual sharing platform. I actually took my website down as a result of Instagram because websites are a very professional space where all completed works are on there, and it’s almost like a professional document. Instagram, and I think the way that the world is operating right now, is they want personal access. They want to see the tricks of the trade. They want to see something that people can be invested in. They want to track the progress. They don’t want a finished result all the time. That’s what I find compelling about Instagram. It’s a very vulnerable place because you can post something that doesn’t work out and then it’ll always be that painting that didn’t work out that’s on Instagram, but you live with it. You take chances with the work. I think it puts a little bit more accountability on you. It becomes about a personal process. Instagram is an interesting place where the process is laid bare, and as a teacher of painting I can send my students to look at how I approach a painting, so instead of always being on hand it becomes a little bit of an off-site resource that people can access. They can see how I stretch a canvas, how I prime a canvas, how I get my image on there, how I block it out — it’s all out there. It’s the whole process. What it does is it builds a portfolio that students can go back to. I put my Instagram account on my syllabus as a supplement. Instagram is one of those connecting platforms for visual arts. I give students permission to stalk my account and find the good stuff because a lot of artists that I recommend students I will try and find on Instagram and follow them and there’s at least some connection.
Why do you want your audience to be able to see the steps along the way?
I’m here educating and it just makes sense. You go to most artists’ websites and it’s a finished piece, it’s the nuts and the bolts; here’s the size, here’s the dimensions, here’s when the work was made, here’s what the work is made out of — but they don’t show you how the work was made, and that to me is the one advantage that Instagram has. You can edit it to a certain degree, but if you’re faithful to just posting every once in awhile, you never know where it goes. You never know who shares what and how and it’s been nice surprises. You get comments. It’s kind of like a neat connection that way. With this show I had a very good turnout and I think it had a lot to do with that I was a little more aggressive and tracking down situations within my realm, the university here.
Do you find that it makes your work more personable?
Yes, this show that just went up in Vancouver, Silvery Tones, I found there was a lot more response to it through Instagram. For instance, I was covered in The Province*. Through Instagram, I’ve had a lot of coverage. I just had an interview this past Wednesday with the Langley Times and they came to my studio and took pictures.
Do you think it ever takes away from the physical work?
You can use it for publicity purposes, but there’s not a substitute. I don’t think Instagram, for painting, is ever a substitute. What it does do is cultivate your audience to where they want to go see the physical thing. It’s something that they can actually engage with, rather than just be passive with.
While I was hanging the show there was this person that came in with a selfie stick and she started taking selfies in front of all my paintings. Besides the whole culture around selfies, whatever the case may be, you can tell that the purpose of that exercise was to post it somewhere. Back in the day it used to be completely forbidden to take pictures of the art work, now it’s the exact opposite. We know that the picture of the thing is not the thing. In fact, what it does do is it actually heightens the value of the thing so the more pictures there are of a painting, the more of an aura, the more value we place in the original. When you take a picture it now becomes digital, it becomes flat, and you don’t get a sense of what it is, but hopefully it drives curiosity, and then when people come to the exhibition hopefully they’re blown away because painting does something that digital photography doesn’t and it connects to people. A photo drives you to go there. Why do we put it into a book? Why do we put it on the invitation? Why do we put it out into the world? It tries to get people’s attention and elicit enough of a response that they want to make the physical commitment to go see it.
Silvery Tones is showing at the Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver until November 26. You can also follow Chris on Instagram @christopher.r.friesen.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
