Meredith Frederick
Meredith Frederick is a local artist. She teaches at Mendocino High School, and resides in downtown Fort Bragg, CA.
She has dreamy orbs for eyes and a unique way of seeing, evidenced by her abstract works that line the walls of the gallery she helps manage called “TC Space.” She works with mixed media paper, including acrylic paint, spray paint, wax oil pastels, sometimes colored pencil and paint pens. Her work is worth seeing, especially in person. If no one has yet deemed her this yet, I hereby decree: She is a local treasure.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation: “My work is based on my experiences – they can reference biographical places, people, figures and spaces. With each layer, the reference images get more abstracted and mixed with my imagination. The abstracted elements symbolize the feeling to help communicate a certain story.”
Why do you make art?
“I have so many ideas that I want to pursue, and I feel motivated to do them and I feel good when I do them and can make them happen. It’s an intuitive process and personal experience that I love sharing.”
Standing next to her work, she showed me how she layers and controls lines, uses reference photos for most pieces, sometimes of friends or an environment, and then it gets abstracted from there. Using stencils she can control the lines and different mediums help change the nature of the marks. She uses Arches Rives BFK paper as her base, cause she likes the “weight and feeling of it and it comes with a beautiful deckled edge.” One of the benefits of spending time with artists of Meredith’s caliber is that you get to hear words like “deckled” used in a sentence. I was reminded when she spoke about pens and different types of paint of a Picasso quote.
“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”
Pablo Picasso
I asked how place factors into her creations. She said “Definitely the scenery plays a role in my work. My reference photos come from where I’m at. I love the ocean and all the things about what’s going on in it. When I look for whales and see them, I replay what I see in my head over and over, seeing the skin of the whale. Those moments mean a lot to me. So exciting every time! Even if it’s just the blow hole… At low tide, I love looking for all the treasures, shell pieces, sea urchins, the smells and textures, vast sand dunes, beach dunes that don’t have houses pushed to the edge of the coast line like it is in San Diego. The ocean seems so much bigger up here. The colors of the redwood trees, so fuzzy and beautiful, so fluffy. In addition to their grand size, their needles look like this. Makes me want to give ’em a little shake.”
You can hear the sheer joy at life present in her description of Mendocino. While I am clearly bias and love the coastal terrain and rugged beauty of the oceans here, even more I’m struck by Meredith’s ability to delight in small things. Her senses seem almost heightened, and she uses this perceptivity to take the images of life around her and transform it into wildly original creations.
Last but not least, she told me she’s “obsessed with those wacky wavy incredible arm flailing tube men,” aka the air-powered inflated moving people at car washes and cell phone store fronts. She described a mad and genius plan to make a line of blow up moving sea urchins and place them along Highway 1 or in the redwoods. Hopefully with the magic of Mendocino, she will hatch this plan.
See more of her work:
Meredith Frederick art.com
MFstyle art.com
Insta: @mer_frederick
