A conversation with Ken Freed
“I was a student of printmaking, and there was a French artist, Félix Hilaire Buhot (1847-1898). He started this thing of making these gorgeous prints,” Freed says. “Then he did all kinds of little drawings and things in the margin. I really liked the informality that it brings to prints, having margins in the plate itself that you can write on or draw pictures on. And so I adopted that for this series.”Freed visited the New York studios of Lowell Nesbitt, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Philip Pearlstein, Louise Nevelson, Richard J. Haas, William S. Haney, Stephen Woodburn, Hiroshi Murata, and Robert Indiana. Their studios ranged from the modest to the luxurious. The grandest of all belonged to Nesbitt.