Stephen L. Frederick

 About the Artist

Stephen Frederick is a landscape painter. He currently lives in his ancestral home in Abbeville, Louisiana, and paints in a studio he maintains nearby. He has been painting since 1972. His subject is the lush landscape of his native Vermilion Parish, an area distinguished by an interlocking web of dense woods, open fields, meandering bayous and coulees, and verdant marshes. His medium is oil on linen, canvas or wood panels. His approach, reminiscent of the 19th century French Romantic landscape, builds on that tradition by painting the concept of the landscape through his singular, idiosyncratic style.

Frederick has developed a strong following of collectors, but exhibits infrequently. His one-man exhibition, at Marguerite Oestricher Gallery in New Orleans in 2000, was reviewed by New Orleans art critic, Terrington Calas. His review was published in the article: “Two Traditions,” The New Orleans Art Review, March/April 2000, pp. 24—17. A copy of this article is included in the Further Information section below.

In this thoughtful review, Calas makes several insightful observations about Frederick’s approach to landscape painting, his antecedents, and his enhancement of them. First, he places Frederick’s landscapes within the scope of a certain traditional style, describing his paintings as “serene and welcoming, thematically forthright.” Calas identifies Frederick’s antecedents as painters of the 19th century French Romantic landscape, “those painters lured by the poetic mystery of nature,” chiefly Camille Corot (1796—1875) — “the late Corot of misty and atmospheric pastoral scenes.” He calls Frederick a romantic at heart, observing, “few could equal him in rendering the picturesque scenery.”

And yet, Calas suggests that Frederick is “quite the modernist . . . a landscape painter who interprets his subjects conceptually.” Frederick has developed a singular, idiosyncratic style favoring “surfaces that evince labored fracture” by the application of paint “in varying densities in an unusual web-like skein.” In this style, “details fade, dissolve into the concept. What remains is the sentiment engendered by that experience [of viewing an actual scene in nature]. If a painter attempts to detail it, we are lost in a rush of visual incident. Frederick paints by concept, and the sentiment reaches us. This is a modernish gesture intimated by old Romanticism and fully realized today. . . Frederick’s conceptual approach is as modern as Monet’s poplars and grain stacks. . . Here are exquisite works that disclose an artist’s courtship of a fine tradition [that is, 19th century French Romantic]. Happily, they also disclose his intelligent enhancement of it.”

Further Information

Review: “Two Traditions” by Terrington Calas, New Orleans Art Review, March/April 2000.