Fred "Tate" Billings Artist Statement
I always wanted to be an artist from the time my mother read me comic books while I sat on her lap.
I was lucky enough to have the same art teacher from grade 5 to high school in Rockland, Maine, who managed to get me into Pratt Institute in 1965, or I would have been drafted to Vietnam like most of the males in my class.
At Pratt I majored in advertising, but grew bored and transferred to the Massachusetts College of Art in 1968 to study painting.
The world was aflame, and I left to work for the Associated Press in 1969, quitting after refusing to cover the occupation of University Hall at Harvard.
I was hitch hiking to New York City, but got a ride to Alaska where I made enough money fighting fires to return to Boston to help in the conversion of the Thomas G Plant building in Jamaica Plain - the world’s largest women’s shoe factory built in 1912 - to artist studios.
A devastating fire there in 1976 led me to join the Massachusetts Army National Guard. Although I opposed the war in Vietnam, I wanted an education in electronics, and became a cryptographic repair technician.
Time passed and I made many friends, eventually doing 25 years in the Guard while having a secure space to continue my artwork.
To save money, I also began living out of a truck while researching a book in 1984 called “The Fetish of God”. I also decided to call myself “The FAB Museum of UnNatural History” at that time.
Luckily I didn’t qualify to go to Iraq in 2003, so I retired and moved to the building in Roscoe NY, where my studio and the “museum” are now.
I joined the Catskill Art Society and have had many one person shows at the Laundry King gallery in Livingston Manor and elsewhere. I’ve made many friends in the community with consistent artwork sales.
Michel Negroponte did a documentary on me called “My Autonomous Neighbor” which was shown in my hometown in 2019, screened at the Camden International Film Festival to a rousing response.
Since then, I continued exploring my artwork while working on my studio until I had a bad fall there, and have been at Roscoe Rehabilitation and Nursing Center for going on two years now.
Since my student days I’ve been developing my own approach to the collage method, as shown in the documentary: taking a pencil in each hand, I create a matrix of random interwoven lines, the size of which is determined by the size of the canvas or panel.
Then I examine the matrix for unusual compositions which are always unexpected shapes and forms with no two alike. Each artwork is unique but the repeatable process is the same.
Later, I add photo and other collage elements to increase the unpredictability of the final image, adding color and texture with acrylic paint and other mediums.
“Simplify! Simplify!” [sic] Gertrude Stein once famously said, and that’s what I’m continuing to do in my artwork.
Tate Billings May 27, 2025