"ANDY FRIEDMAN'S FUTURE BLUES"
by Debbie Michaud

In his ballad "Thunder Road," Bruce Springsteen cries, "Well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk." Well Brooklyn-based artist Andy Friedman can't play the guitar, but he has found a way to make his art talk.

"I was born and raised on rock and roll," says Friedman. "I loved Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and Billy Joel. I realized I wanted to [perform], but I'm not a musician."

Friedman paints. He draws, he photographs and he tours. He follows his art around the country, presenting himself along with his pieces in performances modeled after his blues and rock heroes. Imagine Kandinsky on MTV's "Unplugged" or Warhol doing stand-up - this ain't no artist's lecture, this is "watching an interesting person unfold before your eyes," he says.

Currently Friedman is touring to support his latest book Future Blues. It contains mostly Polaroid photographs accompanied by, what else, blues, rock and folk song lyrics. One Polaroid shares the book's title and shows a couple in a red station wagon, the driver blowing an orange horn. In "Skeletons," two empty shopping carts mingle in a vacant parking lot. He uses photography - especially Polaroid photography - as a visceral reaction to his environment, seeing colors before objects and realizing the metaphorical instead of the actual.

As an academically trained oil painter, Friedman's transition to photography came naturally. He spent three years on the same painting titled "Pilot Light" at the Rhode Island School of Design (and, by the way, didn't even finish it by the time he left) and used to believe he wasn't worth anything if he wasn't an oil painter - an oil painter like Ingres and Velasquez nonetheless, who would spend weeks, months and even years on a work.

But society's constraints forced Friedman to reconsider his role as an artist. Working full-time didn't allow much time to create, so rather than abandoning art completely, he decided to revise his approach.

"I had a job and decided it was time to be a brave artist," he explains. "I had the Polaroid period like Picasso had 'the blue years.'" Working on Polaroids came directly as a result of 'Pilot Light'. The hard part about being an artist and the process of being an artist is the same as being a person. Artists set a metaphor for making decisions in their art. They do in their art what people are trying to do in their life."

Mostly he uses his art to "figure out his relationship with the world," he says. In doing so, he hopes to be thought-provoking and inspiring, not merely unconventional. Art for art's sake certainly has its place, just not necessarily in Friedman's work.

In 2001, he founded City Salvage Records (www.citysalvagerecords.com) to publish his first book, Drawings and Other Failures, and to find visual artists similar to himself. At this point, City Salvage has released a number of musical albums - including work by Paul Curreri, Devon Sproule and Brady Earnhart - but has yet to really interest other visual artists.

Friedman, who compares his books to albums and calls himself "a painter with lyrics," and is billed as a "slideshow poet." He will present paintings, drawings and photographs while chatting about life, just like any good blues musician. So come listen to an artist relate the soundtrack of his life. It will be an interesting evening.