Nancy Friese: Living Landscapes

Painter, printmaker, and educator Nancy Friese (b. 1948) immerses viewers in landscapes that percolate with texture and color. Working outdoors, often on large canvases or sheets of watercolor paper, she relies on keen observation and the ability to register the vitality and evanescence of nature through abundant detail and exhilarating hues. Friese’s vivid paintings burst with life, expressing not only how invigorating it is for her as a contemporary artist to make art inspired by nature, but also the vivaciousness of her muse, nature. Friese touches every area of her canvas each time she paints, sustaining as living beings the landscapes that emerges from her brush, even across numerous sittings.

Often, Friese takes up residence at botanical gardens or other preserved landscapes, allowing her to visit multiple times and form a portrait of the place. In 2010, she trained her eye on the landscape of the FloGris Museum, resulting in the large, glowing watercolor Lieutenant River Shore, now in the permanent collection and recently on view in our galleries. Her insightful eye allows her to pick out both unrecognized vistas and smaller moments that elude the ordinary observer, translating nature into art before our eyes. Raised in North Dakota and transplanted to the Northeast, her sensitivity to the distinctiveness of local landscape is remarkable, as she notes the subtleties of gray or blasts of pink in a coastal sky, or the glow of blue and green in a mountain. While generations of landscape painters sought to thrill viewers with dramatic panoramas, Friese delves into the corners or fields that often go unnoticed because we look past them toward something more obviously, or formulaically, picturesque. In this sense, her art shares much with the perspective of contemporary naturalists who find new inspiration and discoveries in neglected spaces, and beauty in what has long been considered mundane. But rather than meticulously document or replicate a space as a naturalist would, Friese uses brushwork, line, and color to conjure the experience of the place and the thrill of nature’s wonder. The artist’s excitement for her subject and for the practice of painting or drawing radiates from all her work, encouraging viewers to share the joys of drinking in that energy.

 

 

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