Featured Artist – Jani Freimann
Q & A
Q: Tell us a little about your art.
Q: Why did you start doing what you do?
Mixing water medias started when I had a need to do works that were not under glass. A gallery I was joining didn’t want any work under glass and up until that point, I had been doing my work on paper and framing it under glass. After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with a way to do my watercolor work on canvas. Now, there are watercolor canvases available, but I still prefer my method of creating an underpainting in acrylic. There now is also a product called Watercolor Ground that can be used to prep a canvas to receive watercolor that I use as well. All methods have to be sealed to protect the completed artwork. For that I use an archival, non-yellowing, acrylic matte sealer spray.
Q: What has changed since you’ve first started?
A: I started with doing exclusively graphite drawing and practicing hyper-realism until I realized that it just wasn’t speaking to my adventurous side. Although it gave me mad drawing skills, doing realism works was agonizingly restricting. It didn’t satisfy my explorative, joyful, humorous nature. I wanted to emote with color, texture and movement in a more carefree way. I admired the looser styles of artwork that leaned towards Impressionism, so I started exploring how I could do that within my artwork. True Impressionism was further from realism than I wanted to go and realism was too far from impressionism so I headed for something in between – realistic or representational, but emotive, loose, colorful and full of movement. Some of my earlier watercolor works show that I was already heading in that direction before I had fully realized that I wanted to go there. I would never have imagined in my realism beginnings that my work would have evolved into the forever challenging, unique style that I call, Impressionistic Realism.