ART OF ARNOLD FRIBERG

Arnold Friberg

Arnold Friberg, isn't just any western artist. He is very much his own man, and he paints the west, or whatever other subject he may choose, in his own way, a way that grows directly out of an individualistic and strong-minded philosophy of life and art.

In a day when many former illustrators who have turned to "fine arts" painting tend to shy away from the term "illustration" as though it were in some way demeaning, Friberg is proud of having come to his present artistic eminence (not his term) through "the great tradition of illustration, the realistic, storytelling art."

"I have never been conscious of a change in my work from illustration to picture-making," he once said. "It is simply that as a picture is made for a slightly different purpose, it takes on a different look. Today I am doing paintings to be hung in the home, but at no time did I say, 'Now I am turning my back on illustrating, now I am going to become a fine arts painter.'"

"The whole idea that there is some kind of gap between fine arts painting and illustration simply isn't true. Painting, as I know it, I learned from the fine illustrators I knew in my youth or from realistic painters whose work I admired. Whatever limitations an illustrator may have are his own, not limitations inherent in a particular method of expression. I can't emphasize this enough. Most of the best American painters did at least some illustrative work. Edwin Abbey, Winslow Homer, John Sloan, Frederic Remington, for example. They developed into painters, but their training was in the illustrative world that makes you observe.

"When, in the middle 'thirties, the idea began creeping in that we should be sort of ashamed of being illustrators and should become 'painters,' this, I believe, was the beginning of decadence. I think a great thing was lost, a great naturalness, a great outpouring.

"I came along at the tail end of this tradition. There are very few of us left. Johnny Clymer is still working, and Donald Teague and Norman Rockwell. Well, I think of myself as sort of the caboose on the train. I am certainly not one of the giants, but maybe I have a little something to say in the final chapter. At least I'll go down bravely, with flags flying.

"I love illustrating. I love the simple, forthright, natural approach to art. I know other artists have other reasons for painting, and I respect them; but for myself, I have no purpose but to tell a story and to tell it as well, as eloquently, as I can."

These are words from the heart of an artist who has known from childhood what God intended him to do, a man who has never compromised with the integrity of his beliefs, who is as sturdy and down-to-earth and as spiritually-buttressed as the distinctive work that is fast earning for him his own special niche in history as one of the most admired and highly soughtafter contemporary American painters.

Arnold Friberg was born December 21, 1913, in Winnetka, Illinois, of a Swedish father and a Norwegian mother, Mormon converts, who had emigrated to America and had settled in Arizona when Arnold was three years old.

The works of Arnold Friberg headline the Husberg Fine Arts Gallery.

"I count myself an Arizona boy because I have no earlier memories of any other place," Friberg says today. "My very first memory is of waking up early one morning and hearing a gurgling sound. We looked out a window and saw we were in the middle of a lake. Cave Creek dam had broken, as it did every couple of years. I was excited to see a gate floating by with two chickens on it. We kids thought it was great fun. We sat on the porch and sailed boats. But the people on either side of us had low houses, and the water went right through them."

His mother used to keep him quiet, he recalls, by letting him copy the lettering out of a newspaper, and he copied it all.

"That was my earliest endeavor. At the age of seven, I decided I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist and began drawing a cartoon every day.

"My father worked in the Heard Building in Phoenix, where the newspaper, The Arizona Republican, was published, and he knew the editor, whom we called Uncle Billy Spear. He was a fine old gentleman, the very picture of an editor. I remember he wore black-rimmed glasses with a black ribbon hooked to his chest.

"Well, my dad promised me that on my eighth birthday he would take me down to see the editor, and he did. We took along a stack of my cartoons. I will always remember Uncle Billy's kindness as he explained how I would have to learn to draw with pen and ink rather than with pencil, and, crude as they were, he complimented me on the originality of my cartoons."

Two years later, Arnold's interest in cartooning had not diminished, and his parents allowed him to take a correspondence course in the subject. Then, one Sunday evening, when father and son were in the lobby of the Heard building, Dwight B. Heard himself came along."

Mr. Heard had come to Arizona for his health, had regained it, and was now a fine physical specimen, a sort of Theodore Roosevelt type. He was, in fact, a good friend of Teddy's. Heard was a big man in the state. He never quite succeeded in being elected governor, but he seemed to run everything.

My dad introduced me to him and said, 'This boy wants to be an artist.'"

Now, most people would have mumbled, 'How nice, and let it go at that. But Heard said, 'So he wants to be an artist, does he? Well, I want him down here next Saturday. He can see our cartoonist at work and go through the plant. I want him to see how a newspaper is put together.'"

I didn't need a second invitation. From then on I spent many wonderful Saturdays down there. Fred Smith was the cartoonist. I used to watch him work, so very early I developed a professional outlook on art. I can say that I have never really felt like an amateur. Art to me in the early days was always something done for publication."

"After a while Reg Manning replaced Smith as cartoonist, and Reg was a big hero to me. I thought he was the greatest artist in the world, and to this day he has remained a wonderful friend."

At 13, Arnold was apprenticed to a Phoenix sign painter, Bob Norton. Soon the boy had his own little accounts doing show cards for drugstores and real estate companies. He earned, he recalls, the munificent sum of 25¢ a card. Later he graduated to outdoor sign painting, and at 16 he spent the summer in Prescott doing enormous signs in oils advertising Mission Butter and huge plates of waffles and sausages for Trobree Packing Company.

"It wasn't very artistic, you might say, but I learned poster design from it and was gradually working my way into art and picture-making from the practical end. Since then I've done pretty much every branch of commercial art there is, one time or another."

During this period Arnold was attending Phoenix Union High School, the only high school in the city at the time, and studying art under "a most unusual lady," Cordelia Perkins. "In four years I never saw her draw a line. She taught by cajoling, storytelling, criticizing, and doing her level best to bring out the best in her students. She had a strong feeling about composition, and perhaps because of that, composition has been vital to me all of my working life not so much trying to put in "more" composition, as Miss Perkins used to ask for, but to have always better and better composition in my paintings.

"Later, when I met Cecil B. DeMille and went to work for him on 'The Ten Commandments,' he told me he had a weakness for composition; and when I had painted the scene in Pharaoh's court in which Moses' rod is changed into a serpent, he said, 'I wish I had as much composition on the screen as you have in your painting.' "

In high school, where he was the recipient of numerous awards for drawing and painting, Friberg recalls that he concentrated on western and biblical subjects, then as now.

"To me it proves that one's natural predilections are evident very early in life," he says.

Friberg was only 17 when, on the strength of a $500 loan from Dwight Heard's widow, he went east to study, first in Chicago, then in New York. The Great Depression was on, and for a while Arnold worked daytimes and studied at night. It was during this period that he met many of the famous illustrators he still so greatly admires; and it was in 1937 that, as a commercial artist and illustrator by then himself, he acquired the account that became, and still remains, a high point in his career.

"In 1937 in Chicago work was very slow. There had been ads in the paper for the Northwest Paper Company that featured drawing of the Canadian Mounted Police. I was just sitting there thinking how much I would like to have a crack at that job when I received a phone call from them. I went down to see them and did my first picture for them. "I didn't especially know horses then, but believe me, I learned them fast. I really put in a lot of honest sweat getting acquainted with horses. I finally got the account, and it has been one of the pleasantest and most profitable experiences of my career. I believe the mounted police line I do for them has been the longest-lasting theme in American advertising history. It's become an institution through the years, and, best of all, the men themselves like my pictures, perhaps because they are the most authentic ever done of them."

In token of this appreciation, Friberg has been named an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and in January, 1973, he and his wife Hedve were flown to the remote settlement of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories to participate in the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the organization, the exploits of which he has been portraying on calendars for 35 years. The originals of those calendar paintings, which have brought their creator some $300,000 in that time, are now eagerly sought-after collectors items.

Friberg spent 38 months in the infantry during World War II. Shortly after his discharge, he met a Utah girl in Chicago, married her, and they went to San Francisco to live for a couple of years, later moved to a suburb of Salt Lake City, surrounded by mountains and canyons, "a fine place in which to raise a family."

Of his many moves, Friberg says today, "I have lived in many places, but I have never felt really at home except in Arizona. I belong in Arizona, and I still love it with an exile's affection. There is something in the air, a magic. I loved Chicago and San Francisco and I have liked many places, but Arizona is in my soul."

Yet although he came early to the American southwest and despite his continuing attraction for western subjects, Friberg did not become a "western" painter as such until relatively late in his career his first one-man show in this field was held in November, 1971, at the Husberg Fine Arts Gallery, Sedona, Arizona, the gallery that still handles his western paintings exclusively.

Friberg, however, has no difficulty in equating his two apparently diverse interests. To him, indeed, the biblical and the western are actually closely related.

He talked of this recently to Allen Husberg, the dealer who "fell in love with Friberg's work at first sight," and who has become a close friend.

"There may be something in our common Swedish background that makes for congeniality," Husberg says, "but the main thing is that we are both artists. We talk the same language."

They talk a lot, these two, when they meet, and one day their conversation centered on Friberg's choice of subject matter and why he is now concentrating upon the western scene. "I am simply an artist who tries many things," Friberg said. "I didn't start out to be either a western or a biblical artist. I love history, not just the west, and I love bible stories, partly because they are history. It all ties together.

"I grew up on the Arizona desert, and that's one reason why I can do the Holy Land with the right feeling. People who haven't lived on the desert think it is unhospitable, but when you have lived with it, you know it isn't always that way. I know what it is like to have one's tongue swell from thirst, but I also know that there are mornings and evenings, rainstorms and wildflowers, a great variety. "Then, too, my viewpoint has always been colored by my faith, a strong faith, the sort the pioneers must have had. I

like to paint things that do not change, so naturally I am drawn both to the Bible and to the American West. Actually, I find an almost biblical feeling about the west, and I think a lot of people feel this.

"Take Indian life, for example. It isn't computerized. It's not a part of the jet age. It isn't marred by civilization's artificiality. I think that's the appeal. Poor as the Indians are, and certainly there are poor Indians, they have a kind of nobility that speaks of scripture."

Friberg and his family have lived since 1947 in Holladay, Utah, and some day he intends to do a series of paintings depicting that state's history. "But it won't be just hell-raising miners," he says. "It will be epic and timeless, biblical in feeling like all the west, vigorous he-man stuff guided by the divine hand."

Allan Husberg, a native of Sweden who came to the United States some 25 years ago, was an artist long before he became a gallery owner, so the two men often get down to professional specifics when they talk, and although Husberg ranks Friberg as tops among contemporary western painters, there are occasional areas of disagreement between them.

Friberg often comes back to the subject of painting horses.

"Just to learn the horse is so fascinating, it's almost an insanity that takes over," he says. "You can't just copy a photograph. You can tell paintings that have been done that way. They sort of trace the highlights and slither down the legs. You have to understand, because here's the form, dictated by the anatomy, and the light plays upon it as the horse moves by.

The horseflesh actually shimmers by. It is light playing upon the form, not the set bunch of highlights you get in a photograph. You have to understand this to make it real, so I study horses as often as I can and make little sketches of the hock joints and other parts.

"To me, the picturing of these things is practically an act of worship. I bow before the creator's handiwork, the marvel of how a hock joint is put together, say. And it's not just animals. It's the anatomy of trees, too, the way at high altitudes the roots seem to have an intelligence within them that tells them to wrap themselves around a rock to keep the tree from being blown away. How the aspen trees are bent over and blackened by the snow, then in the springtime up they go. And cactus plants, how they reach down into the ground to get water. The whole thing, the design, the engineering, is a marvel.

"You know, Beethoven used to walk in the woods. They tell us he studied the trees and said, 'I want to raise up my voice and sing Holy, Holy, Holy.' "Well, I feel that way. I think that when I paint I am trying to say a hymn to the creator. This is what I feel strongest about, animals and man in their settings. That's why I tend to fill up my pictures.

"I tend to fill practically the whole picture with animate life, including just enough landscape to identify the setting. I like to move in close, even on the plants. It's difficult for me to keep a painting open. If I see a little space, I think I can fit in something else. Generally, the open distance is just peeking in and out. This doesn't mean the painting has to be Text continued on page 44Red River cart, the common vehicle of western Canada, constructed without nails. Joints made by dowelling, mortise-and-tennon, etc. Its 5-foot wheel rims were wrapped in rawhide "tires."