Fred Art Gallery Opening

by A.D. Amorosi

art

Unlike the primitive paintings of Howard Finster, the art brut of

Jean Dubuffet or the outsider school of Madge Gill -- childish works indeed -- painter/gallery owner Fred Shore makes children's art. Actually, he makes Fred Art, based on kids' paintings found through hundreds of sources, then imaginatively recreated or simply painted -- for what winds up as new product -- his Fred Art of enormous size, wonder and luster. "While some artists attempt to paint like children -- something I don't believe an adult can do -- I've simply chosen to express the child's basic innocence and keep it intact, drawing what it is they can't draw," says Shore of what, essentially, is a secret collaboration between himself and an unknown youth for a work that's anonymous in several ways. "The paintings I do become generic," he says, pointing out that he signs all works "Fred Art," "because all children's art is generic in that any child could do it. Their art is anonymous. My name is anonymous."

How Shore got to Fred Art is as fascinating and confounding as his gentle patter. Along with studying photography with Harold Feinstein, Shore, a 68-year-old Philadelphian, has worked as a film editor, commercial ad producer and documentary filmmaker for the likes of PBS and Columbia Pictures while still doing abstract-expressionist painting and printmaking. "All that, yet I was never able to get into a New York gallery. I felt I had no niche." That is, until Fred Art. Shore's gallery is lined with collages and paintings, in color or in stark-and-silly black and white. Sometimes the paintings are numbered, sometimes named simply for their buyers or the first name of the youth he's based said painting on. In any case, you'll find a sly cunningness at work. "My sophistication is imbedded in their art. Or vice versa," says Shore, who copies kids' works from old books and other juvenile sources and adds what he sees as layers of sophistication and specificity in the name of Fred Art. "It's not as if I'm erasing their name or personality. All children's art is generic. Nonspecific. Save for the name at the bottom, you wouldn't know that it was, say, "Jimmy' who painted it. I could call the paintings "Jimmy.' But it's my gallery and my activity, so … "

Gallery opening, Fri., Feb. 20, 6-9 p.m., Fred Art, 350 S. 15th St., 215-772-1508.