It’s funny but when I take a look at the people with whom I’ve been really close over the years the number of people in that group is really quite small and yet the number of artists within that small group is surprisingly quite large.

I myself am not in the least bit artistic — I can’t even draw a straight line and the math of musical performance is well beyond my ken — but looking at my friends, and even family members, the number of artists in the group is really quite extraordinary.

Eric Freeman — self portrait — from an article on Eric that ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

My brother Kenneth, as many of you who read this blog regularly know, is an avante garde composer and keyboardist of no small renown with his music available commercially and free on the interweb of tubes here.  And my youngest brother Ted is a highly accomplished photographer and graphic designer as well as the drummer for the New York alt rock band The Blisstones.

My ex boyfriend Little Rock, aka Hot House Brent, in addition to being a world renowned pornographer is also a concert level pianist with an advanced degree in piano performance from the elite Eastman School of Music.  Seriously, I’m not making this shit up.

My decades long buddy Ivan Vera, aka Gabriel Cortez, is a truly amazing painter whose work proudly hangs in my home and whose DVDs frequently grace my television screen.

Bill Cullum, and for whom this blog is named, was a “semi-famous” artist prior to becoming a genuinely famous meth dealer. Bill has had a number of shows in New York and been reviewed favorably in Art Forum and the New York Times before taking up the federal government on their generous offer of free room and board until 2010.

One of Bill’s larger paintings graces this blog in the upper left corner and a number of his pictures, including that painting, are also on the walls of my home.

Industrial — by Eric Freeman

My ex boyfriend Oliver, although not an artist himself except perhaps in the art of administering physical pleasure, {OK, I know, too much right?} is the owner of a fancy and famous New York art gallery and who, in spite of his fanciness and fame, still has not gotten me the information on a photograph that I seek and that he promised me he would.  But that’s for a future blog post complete with highly unflattering pictures.

Anyway, this post is actually about another friend of mine named Eric Freeman whose paintings I’ve put up here for you to see.

I met Eric at the Roxy nightclub in New York when he was just a 19 year old student fresh out of New York’s Stuyvesant High School and attending Tufts University in Boston.

To say that there was a more beautiful boy than Eric living in New York City at the time may very well be a statement of fact but I had certainly never seen that person nor met him and would doubt his existence until I did. For Eric at 19, you see, was pretty much all that and a bag of chips as far as I and most people who knew him or saw him were concerned.

Eric had these lost puppy eyes in a face straight from a painting by Caravaggio with lips that looked as if they were desperate and begging to be locked onto by a set of equally voluptuous and desperate lips — or better still, wrapped around a dick.  They were lips that were soft and always rosy red that were kept that way through Eric’s almost pathological addiction to strawberry chap stick.

Landscape — by Eric Freeman

At the age of 19 Eric did not yet have the seriously muscular physique that he developed later in the gym.  Much of that gym time being spent with me at the New York University weight room.  At 19, when we met, he had a college boy swimmers bod that combined with his face turned me, and most people who met him frankly, right into melting butter.

When we were first introduced to each other on the dance floor at the Roxy I was with Hot House Brent and after introductions were made Brent said, “is Eric the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen in your life or what?” Although I’m sure Brent will deny to his dying day ever uttering those words.

Anyway, over the years Eric and I became very close and after Brent and I split up Eric would camp out over at my apartment keeping me company during the day and using it as our base of operations for our forays out into the New York nightlife underground.  We actually spent pretty much one entire summer one year hanging out on my terrace sunning ourselves and smoking pot, both of us having decided — after quitting our respective jobs without giving notice – that not working and smoking dope while tanning and having cocktails was so much more fun than working.

Eventually Eric met Ross Bleckner who saw in Eric a nascent talent for painting and he took him under his wing as his protege and soon enough Eric moved into the building that Ross owns down on White Street — the building that used to house the old Mudd Club in fact and that Ross uses as both home and atelier.

In those early years under Ross’ tutelage Eric was an astonishingly prolific painter producing dozens if not hundreds of paintings a year, a large number of which I own and that were painted under Ross’ watchful eye in the Bleckner studio.

Red Green — by Eric Freeman

In fact, Eric always used to say that I have the single largest collection of his paintings in private hands and many of them are really quite amazing.  Especially the ones that he painted just for me as birthday or Christmas presents.  Others, well….not so much {sorry Eric but you know its true}, and show the impatience and lack of confidence of a beginning artist trying to find his voice.

When I would get angry at Eric for some real or imagined offense I would threaten him with releasing the really bad ones that I own onto the market thus driving down his prices if not outright killing his burgeoning career.

One of my favorite works of his that I own is not a painting at all but a photograph of an object Eric has steadfastly refused over all these years to identify.  The photo, or photos actually, are mounted in nine, small matching steel frames.  These nine framed images form a single work that’s designed to be hung in a series either linearly or in a 3′ X 3′ square.  It’s a work that is actually much larger than the nine pieces I own for the rest of the work, comprising almost three dozen framed images and from which my nine were taken, belongs to Dolly Parton and hangs prominently in her LA. home.

I see via The Google that a number of Eric’s paintings are in the Saatchi Collection in London and that he’s represented in New York by über gallerist Mary Boone so good for him.  It seems his career has taken off and maybe my pictures are worth a bunch of dough now.

I haven’t spoken to Eric or heard from him in ages although I know he used to be a reader of this blog.  So Eric, if you read this, call me or write. Because if I don’t hear from you I think I may just try to sell a dozen or so of these really, really early pictures of yours.  You know the ones I’m talking about Eric — they’re the ones you like to try to say somebody else painted but that are quite inconveniently signed with your name.

Those paintings.

Scott

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.