Andrea Fredeen has taken a serpentine path to become a professional artist.
Her grandfather Theodore Buran might have wished it to happen sooner, but Fredeen had to exercise the other side of her brain first.
And exercise it truly was.
While Buran's influence arrived in Prince George decades earlier, and can still be seen today, his granddaughter didn't arrive from their Saskatchewan family base until more recently. He came only in the form of masterful art - he was commissioned to paint some of the decorative panels in St. George's Ukrainian church - while she came in person to ply her medical skills as a physiotherapist and raise her family with husband Dr. Lawrence Fredeen.
But always, around the edges of her life, there was the undercoat of her grandfather's craft, like the indirect seeping of his painters' skills. He never taught her a formal program of lessons, but like an heirloom quilt or the family photos on an elder's wall, it was just a granted condition of early life.
"Whenever I'd go over, there was always the smell of paint," she said.
Flip through the below slideshow to view the Alphabet Project art and a link to each artist story:
Others in her family took up art as a prominent part of their lives, and even though she was on a path firmly between the lines of science, she still gravitated towards the galleries of Saskatoon when she wasn't buried in books and appointments as a university student.
Something about moving to Prince George changed that. Painting slowly but profoundly grew more prominent. First, she fell in with an oily crowd. Gene Bricker and Margaret Jones-Bricker became close friends, and both put the making of art high on their personal priority list. Fredeen not only took notice, she took lessons.
Then, UNBC partnered with Emily Carr University of Art+Design on an art degree based in Prince George. It was not offered again and Fredeen feels almost spiritually grateful she took a leap of faith to join the program.
The banks of her life were starting to erode. The course of her personal river was starting to cut new channels.
Her acquired painting skills were being noticed, not the least of which by herself. The Two Rivers Gallery offered her an exhibition. Companies and agencies asked her to do some of their corporate branding (the Twisted Words poetry event posters had her background; X Conditioning's "Where The Big Dogs Play" t-shirts were her design). When she opted to take a masters program, her thesis was "about storytelling using visual art and the written word," she explained and revealed how complete her paradigm had now shifted. She was never going to not be a physiotherapist but she was certainly and confidently now an artist as well.
Which is why, since she was between major projects of her own, she gravitated to the Alphabet Project when its call for submissions was announced. This was a 100th anniversary program offered by The Citizen in partnership with the Community Art Council. Interested artists who made the shortlist of 26 were randomly assigned a letter of the alphabet, and they were given free rein to create a work of art somehow connected to that letter.
"I knew I had a voice, a story I could maybe tell in that way," Fredeen said.
She was one of the chosen artists and the letter she was assigned was S.
She set up her canvas, assembled her oils (her go-to medium), and then called up her medical history to inform her new piece.
It could even be characterized as an extension piece of her Two Rivers Gallery exhibition. For that body of work she focused on the human hand and the way it moves and articulates. So, too, is this Alphabet Project painting a study in hand-eye coordination. It looks only like a raised fist to the untrained eye "but it is the letter S done in American Sign Language," Fredeen explained, "which goes back to my therapy background and ties into my gallery show and my masters thesis. It kind of touches all that."
Her scientific and artistic sides share a common trait: fastidiousness.
"I agonize over everything. I have a bad habit of overthinking things," she said. "For that painting I used an actual model, that is Zoe Watt, a speech language pathologist with the Child Development Centre."
Many paintings are corner-to-corner symbolism but this one Fredeen said was literal. The red background was only because she loved those shades and it made the visual effect of the arm and hand pop.
She is currently applying her skills to a bigger project. A gallery in Smithers has invited her to do an exhibition of all new work.
She is also scheduled to take the next step in her artistic evolution. This fall, Two Rivers Gallery is having her in as a teacher for an oil painting class.
Her grandfather would be proud.
"Art is so important for society," she said. "Not even the concept of having galleries and being connected to art as viewers, but creating art yourself. It's so important to do, if at all possible. It's effect is much bigger than the thing itself that you made - the painting or the sketch or the sculpture - it is how that creative process changes your mind. I know it has affected the way I see the world and the way I've been able to communicate. Artists are important because they act as witnesses for what's happening in society, but also for fostering critical thought, for teaching how to think about how to think."
That often takes society, and each person within it, on a long and winding road.
