The compositions are about ambiguities of form and void, foreground and background, and surface and deep space. Also, they are about ambiguities of associational images and pure abstraction, referential, and non-referential structures. My sources are often ancient architecture. I am fascinated by archaeological and architectural spaces, particularly their sense of mystery. It is this mystical and mysterious quality I seek in my painted structures. I do this by softly modulating color tone and value to create illusions of emanating light, where one's eyes and spirit are invited to linger.

Douglass Freed

What Freed does is create his own order of things, his own artistic mini-cosmos, in which shapes, arrangements, colors and relationships all operate according to the rhythms that the artist establishes.
That is quite remarkable, and on top of it, the paintings are beautiful. In the midst of all this order and regularity and fitting together parts, paint is applied in lyrical bruch strokes that suggest leaves caressed by the wind or light reflecting off a brook - or a Monet under a microscope.

Robert Duffy, Art Critic St. Louis Post Dispatch

Freed's work perhaps can best be seen as a very classical statement within the mainstream of modern art. There is a sense in which his work falls within the minimalist context, a reduction in form , a craftsman like regard for materials and workmanship, and a non-painterly surface. But the form is far more complex and admits more variations than most minimalist work, and the color surface is as fluid and evocative as a Turner or Monet. Of greater significance is the "idea" behind the work, the possibility of challenging the limits of art as the conceptualists wish to do, but in a way which preserves the aesthetic values that much of their art would deny.

Vera B. Townsend

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