Fred Woller – Fleischmanns, NY Artist

   SuddenIy, now that I find myself in my eighties, everything I’ve learned in the past, seems to be coming together.  Over the years I have finally found a medium with which I feel very comfortable.   

After my high school art teacher entered a painting of mine into a NYC exhibit and it gained an honorable mention, I was encouraged to continue creating art.  Years later I attended Queens College, where  I studied with 2 well known constructivists of the time.   One of them liked the work I was doing and gifted me a large block of wax. I loved working with the material, and being influenced by Henry Moore at the time, I began my reclining women series.

I left school in the early eighties to begin renovations on a brick townhouse I had purchased; a large part of the renovation was restoring the plaster work.  From there I hooked up with two architects who were creating wonderful interiors with curved walls, different levels and restoration of architectural details.  In the mid 80’s when I moved upstate to restore another 1870’s home, which also involved a lot of plaster work, art went on the back burner.  

In 1996 I turned the dining room into an art studio and began making art again.  I went through a period of making large format paintings; my bicycle series, and my bird series.  Concurrently I began working with plaster molds, doing reliefs in plaster from clay models.  

In 2015, someone saw one of my small bicycle reliefs at a gallery, and commissioned me to do a large relief (7’6” x 3’6”) for City Hall in Kingston to replace a missing lunette in the main courtroom.  I made the clay model in my studio, and it was then transported to a plasterer who made a rubber mold.  This is when I first began using rubber molds for reliefs.  

I am currently working on plaster reliefs, based on unique characteristics of animals and movement.  My interpretations are influenced by and loosely based upon the work I experienced teaching young children when I was in education.  Their thinking was so pure and uncorrupted. My evolution in the last few years has gone full circle from the complexity of Henry Moore to the simplicity of children, and I’m having great fun.