Engineer/photographer finds beauty in Alberta 's sloughs and lakes
Art plumbs the murky depths
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Hanneke Brooymans |
The Edmonton Journal |
Sunday, September 18, 2005
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EDMONTON -- Most people would find little use for Alberta 's shallow, mucky, algae-infested lakes and sloughs, but Eric Fredine has managed to turn them into art.
He melds together the water and sky of Cooking Lake , Beaverhill Lake and Bittern Lake into breathtaking hybrids of landscape and abstract art.
Some people might be surprised to learn these photographs, each infused with the glow of the rising and setting sun, were taken by a computer engineer.
The 41-year-old still wears his engineer's iron ring with pride. But in the last four years Fredine has managed to nurse both sides of his personality and still make a living.
His passion for art has led him to spend long vigils at the lake in order to catch the fleeting striking light at dawn and dusk. During the summer, he would rise at 3 a.m. or spend the night in his car.
Usually, he had the lakes to himself.
"Sometimes a dog from one of the local farms would join me out on the ice at Cooking Lake in the early winter evenings," Fredine says. "I was always carrying a tripod. When he saw me he probably thought, 'It's the guy with the extra legs.' "
Fredine's photographs look like they were shot from a ladder, perhaps because the clouds seem to be hanging so close to the lake. But the six-foot-two artist says he took almost all of them from eye level.
"There's an absence of scale markers," says Fredine-the-engineer, explaining why the clouds seem to hang so close to the lakes in his photos. He would purposefully avoid including trees, and usually even plants, in order to avoid adding a sense of scale to the photos.
THE PERFECT CANVAS
Prairie lakes were the perfect canvas for his art. "These places are so flat even your perception is changed.
"It's very Albertan, that big sky."
Fredine spent hours on the lake, sometimes wading out a couple of kilometres through the shallow water, to get a perfect photograph. He would scan the water and sky, looking for patterns.
When he saw something he liked, he used his digital camera to capture the image as quickly as he could, aware that the clouds would change the composition of the picture quickly.
"I don't know if you've ever sat and watched them, but those suckers move pretty fast."
He also learned to operate his camera quickly in - 35 C weather and little rubber "boot chains" helped him walk the ice. The engineer in him noted that major cracks in the ice seemed to form in the same place each year, likely due to the geometry of the lake, he theorized.
His computer engineering degree and his job as vice-president at Saville Systems, a software company, took him away from that kind of interaction with the natural world.
In 2001, there was a sudden and dramatic return shortly after he bought his wife a digital camera.
When his wife delayed her exploration of the gift, the engineer in Fredine became impatient, and he took over.
"I was hooked by the fact that I could control everything," he says.
Fredine's photographs will hang in the Lando Gallery until Oct. 8.
Brent Luebke, the gallery's art dealer, says it is not unusual for them to display work from people who developed their artistic talents later in life.
Everyone thinks artists all developed from a young age and took the art school route, Luebke says, but often people find they have time to explore their talents when they are established in another field.
hbrooymans@thejournal.canwest.com
© The Edmonton Journal 2005