“You can never really know what a big lake and a trackless wilderness contain — sun blazes and black patches of shadow, the distant thunder breeding wind and wreckage, the massive cloud mountains and swirling brushstrokes of sky, clinging fog. And then the march of seasons, breaking down the weak and strong together, grinding rocks, corrupting old trees, crushing limbs and roots, leaving rotting logs and stumps with fox fire will-o-the-wisps and strange sounds breaking out in the form of cracks and whispers, all muttering about the old lives and actions, shadows of the fleeting presences of those who led the lives and performed the actions. These are what the lakes and woods contain.”
— Fred Brian, from the introduction to his suite of wood engravings, “Shadows & Images”.
“Fred Brian is first and most importantly an artist of place: a place which becomes, through his work, a complex visual world composed of the natural wilderness of the Upper Great Lakes, the wilderness of the artist’s own imaginative powers, and the wilderness of Native American mythology and Upper Peninsula folklore.”
— Ben Mitchell, Curator of Collections and Exhibits for the Art Center of Battle Creek in Michigan
“Fred’s personal mythology comes from early childhood memories on Lake Gogebic and from images derived from family photo albums going back close to the turn of the century. A second group of images relate to effigy figures, grotesque faces or masks which are accurate representations of artifacts from mound sites in Illinois and other parts of the midwest. (For a time, Fred worked at mound sites as a scientific illustrator.) The third element, know to anthropologists as a “hybrid” figure, is a subject that continually appears in North American native mythology. The hybrid will be seen as a half human, half animal creature. And Willy Burmeister is the fourth theme, an Upper Peninsula folk hero purely out of Fred’s imagination, but of a type of U.P. hero we all talk about.”
— Phil Kucera, owner of the Pine Tree Gallery in Ironwood, Michigan
