Bio

DAVID FREMERMAN (b. 1959, Kansas City, Missouri) is a painter, poet, and improv actor living and working in Dallas, Texas. He received an MFA in painting from Indiana University Bloomington in 1990, and an MA in painting from Fontbonne University in St. Louis in 1988. He frequently writes about painting through poetry and is on the verge of publishing his first book of poems entitled Small Moments: Poems about Painting and Other Abstractions (2026).

He began to seriously study art at the age of 14 in classes with a Catholic quasi-Zen Buddhist artist who also taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, whose surname, no kidding, was Monks. For the next four years these classes at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art went beyond the formal aspects of painting, into the more profound idea of how to see. For a kid that didn’t like the way art was taught in school, this was an auspicious beginning.

Over the next nine years he was mostly self-taught, outside of a few university classes in drawing, painting, and art history. Looking back on this time, he remains grateful for missing the undergraduate art experience, as it allowed his work to develop with his quirks and idiosyncrasies intact.

He began to seriously study art at the age of 14 in classes with a Catholic quasi-Zen Buddhist whose surname, no kidding, was Monks. For the next four years these classes at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art went beyond the formal aspects of painting, into the more profound idea of how to see. For a kid that didn’t like the way art was taught in school, this was an auspicious beginning.

Over the next nine years he was mostly self-taught, outside of a few university classes in drawing, painting, and art history taken from time to time. Looking back on this time, he remains grateful for missing the undergraduate art experience, as it allowed his work to develop with his quirks and idiosyncrasies intact.

here or therein the practice of making art, seeing art in the flesh, and art history.

Over the next nine years, he taught himself to paint, working from nature and models, and by seeing great paintings in the flesh. Attending Washington University in St. Louis he obtained a BS in chemical engineering in 1982, and later in life worked for several decades as an environmental engineer to help make ends meet. Today his paintings lightly revolve around ideas of mathematics, empirical science, philosophy, and cosmology.

As a believer that airtight logic leads to stuffy art, he prefers the fleeting, not-quite-sure response. Sometimes his themes evolve organically, at other times in quantum leaps. It’s all about following the impulse, the spontaneous flow, not imposing too forcefully upon a subject. What is painting for if not to find pleasure amid uncertainty? As Sri Aurobindo taught his disciples, “The side of thought is not enough; the side of delight too must be entirely grasped.”

Whether writing or painting, his thoughts can range from the quotidian to the cosmological, and despite the accompanying scientific backdrop, his work remains a running argument against over-calculation.