Fred Salzman was born in The Bronx, NY in 1932 and died in 2010 in Rio Rancho, NM, where he had lived for 20 years. After studying at the School of Visual Arts, he pursued a career in typography and printing at a time when these skills were still about personal & artistic expression. The drawings for sale were created in the early 1960s while Salzman was still in NYC, where he explored his artistic obsession with drawing and painting strangers in public environments. They were primarily representational, realistic, and a single color (mostly black & white). His subjects appear to be unaware of being viewed and memorialized; they are often seen from behind or at three-quarter view, away from the artist. Salzman’s work rarely attributes emotion to its subjects but he does frequently catch them in the act of eating, reading, or smoking. Many are of a single person. In groupings of people, it is not obvious the figures are interacting, giving his work a distancing feeling; almost scientific in its observation. He does not labor over context or environment and focuses solely on the person or people, without an obvious meaning or message. His depictions are made with few lines and an abstraction of detail, which gives them a contemplative quality. His work, with its emphasis on minimalistic forms and understated elegance, serves as a perfect complement to spaces with a mid-century modern design or aesthetic.