Fred Lower is an artist living and working in Middlebury, Vermont. His work has been featured in galleries in New York, Montana and Vermont. Lower taught painting and drawing for more than three decades at the Dalton School in NYC and Rutland Public High School in Vermont. Lower studied painting at UC Berkeley, and received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Studio Interview with Fred Lower
Artist Statement
Two things had a profound influence on me as a young art student in the 1970s: the intensity of the California light and the teaching of Bay Area painter Elmer Bischoff.
A fluid brush stroke and gestural improvisations were a starting point for my search for composition and expressive possibilities of color in my large abstract paintings. After almost 20 years in New York City and a move to Vermont, I have found in this landscape an attachment to place. Now I paint smaller paintings that somehow try to feel big.
I paint what I see. I work best when I paint directly from the subject. The motifs that I find most engaging are often the easiest to find because they are right outside my back door. I live a short distance from where the Middlebury River joins the Otter Creek. It is, quite simply, a plethora of compositions, a feast of forms for an artist.
Addison County is sometimes referred to as the “banana belt” of Vermont. I love it. Even in the depths of winter the sun still finds a way to warm this low country that follows the Middlebury River to Otter Creek out to Dead Creek and finally Lake Champlain. A wise plein air painter once told me, “When it’s cold set up your easel in the sun. When it’s hot set up in the shade.” It is a good place to start.
