Tremendous Trees, Bending Skies and Greenswards: Nancy Friese
January 29 to March 5, 2010
Nancy Friese's landscapes reflect nature's forms using colors, lights, textures and spaces from a chosen view and a specific place. Friese's paintings and prints have been exhibited in more than 25 solo shows and 170 group shows, nationally and internationally. The recipient of several prestigious competitions and awards, Friese has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, including the Japan-US Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellowship. She was granted a Lila Acheson Wallace Giverny Fellowship, a Blanche E. Colman Award, Pollock-Krasner Foundation funding and a George Sugarman Foundation Grant for painting. Artist's Resource Trust (A.R.T.) funded a past exhibition.
Friese's artworks have been exhibited in many countries and throughout the United States. She has shown work at the Barbican Center, London; Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, Denmark; Tokyo's Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan; Bronx River Art Center, International Center of Print New York, The New York Public Library and Snug Harbor Cultural Center, New York, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York; College of Wooster Art Museum, Ohio; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks; and the RISD Museum of Art, Providence. Her works are in 45 corporate and museum collections and over a hundred private collections.
Friese has been a part of a range of special artistic communities. She had a residency in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Studioscape Program in the World Trade Center Tower One on the 91st floor until 9/11/01 and in its New Views: DUMBO Program. She has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, I-Park Enclave, the Center for Contemporary Print, and the Museum and City of Pont-Aven Residency Program in Brittany, France. She has painted extensively on the Westerly Land Trust, Rhode Island.
Nancy Friese received an M.F.A. in printmaking from Yale University School of Art. She studied in the graduate painting program at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied painting and printmaking at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She attended Yale University Summer School of Music and Art at Norfolk and has a B.S. from the University of North Dakota. Her work is represented by Cade Tompkins Gallery in Providence, Mimosa Press in Tulsa, art4business in Philadelphia and Riverhouse Editions in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Her artworks can be seen at www.nancyfriese.com. A member of ArtTable, she resides in Rhode Island and North Dakota and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.
Equivalents of nature's forms, colors, lights, textures and spaces synthesize to approximate a chosen view. Landscape painting is a composite of things seen, remembered and felt. By studying nature's phenomena, I tie the visual observations to experience. A unified surface is created by incremental decisions representing the outward world. With unpeopled views, scenes and vistas, one can enter a more philosophical, personal and timeless place. The paintings and prints are of nature close at hand from bays, fields, treetops, and skies. When resolution occurs, the viewer can stand parallel to the artist.
—Nancy Friese