Contemporary Artists | Period Artists (A-H) | Period Artists (H-Z)
Frederick McDuff (1931 - 2011)
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Afternoon RestFrederick H. McDuff was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1931. He always felt he wanted to be a painter and, while stationed in Germany with the Army, he was able to travel and to visit some of Europe’s great museums which would make a lasting impression on the young artist.
In the early 1950’s, McDuff enrolled briefly in the Art Students League with the intention of beginning with the basic element of art - drawing. At the end of three weeks he realized New York offered him a better way of learning than going to art classes. All the riches of New York’s museums, like those in Europe, were open to him. He decided to leave the Art Students League to spend his days in the museums studying the masterpieces, “taking apart the painting” to learn the secrets of such masters Tiepolo, Chardin, Fantin-Latour, Corot and Pissarro. To that analytical study, he added the discipline of painting every day. By the very process of painting and exercising self-criticism, he learned what he should or should not do. In the 1970’s he discovered the abstract painters, for whom he previously had little use, and from them he learned to make his own paintings clearer and simpler.
In the early 1960’s, McDuff left New York for Washington, DC. There he continued to paint but was also able to indulge one of his hobbies - house restoration. With what he now calls twenty-twenty hindsight, he regrets not having studied architecture and historical preservation, but he has made up for that lack by personal study and by the practical experience of restoring a townhouse he purchased. Built in 1916 in the Early Federal Style, McDuff has restored its initial beauty and simplicity. Music is another hobby. A passion for opera, during his New York years he went to the Metropolitan Opera two or three times a week. McDuff also raises roses and for
more than twenty years has been raising poodles.
These diverse hobbies, however, do not distract McDuff from his main interest - painting. He believes that in order to paint well, one must have talent to begin with, but also work constantly, never cease to paint and, above all, one must be truthful to oneself. That McDuff has been faithful to his principles is demonstrated by his many one-man exhibitions.
McDuff strives to achieve greater naturalism by exact analysis of color and tone and by rendering the play of light on the surface of his subjects. His lack of outline and his vivid color create in his paintings a strong impressionist feeling. He has even studied the technical composition of the paints used by the French Impressionists and has learned to alter modern commercially available oil paints to approximate materials used by the 19th-century artists.
One of McDuff’s favorite subjects is his beloved Brittany, to which he frequently returns. There, memory and imagination take over. “Remembered reality is an endless source of inspiration”, he says. His paintings take their viewers to faraway places in time and space, to a world devoid of harshness, a serene place where gentility is the essence of gracious living.
Private collectors of McDuff’s work include former President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan, Ethel Kennedy and Burt Reynolds. As part of the “Art in Embassies” program, the US State Department purchased works by McDuff which currently hang in the American Embassies in Paris and La Paz, as well as, in the State Department in Washington, DC. His work hangs in many corporate collections including those of Occidental Petroleum and TRW Systems. Outside the U.S., he has collectors in England, France, Kuwait, Italy and Japan.
