Freya Your Mind

Sometimes the biggest frustration with creating art is capturing what it is we see in our mind, or what it is we see in front of us for that matter. Imagine a place you have been that really took your breath away. Now grab a pencil and try to draw it, try to write about it, create it again.  Freya Grand’s paintings in her showing at the Greater Reston Arts Center, appropriately titled “JOURNEY” speak of experience and of touch.

I am generally not a fan of landscapes. As an art Major I am supposed to appreciate all genres but I tend to drift by them in museums and gallery openings, and often find them to be over worked, over detailed, and telling me everything I already know. As I walked through Freya’s exhibit with Joanne Bauer, the Exhibitions Director at G.R.A.C.E she expanded on this, “She is showing us the stuff we don’t know”… “There is no self consciences, it’s not about the artist ego”. Freya, in her artist statement: “The (often) gritty and somewhat arduous seeking of places and vistas that are far away and hard to reach provides the spark that sets off a chain of reactions and associations.” These paintings make you stop and look at them and then they ask you to experience.

In an interview with Freya I asked her:

How do you feel about other landscape painters, who are your influences? What do you like to look at?

Freya: I don’t draw my inspiration from other landscape painters, for the most part.  Although Albert Pinckham Rider has always interested me because of the darkness of his landscapes and their mythic quality.  I like looking at 19^th Century Japanese prints (I am drawn to the plunging perspectives and the strong diagonal compositions).  I like looking at Lucien Freud’s human landscapes and the amazingly rich paint application. I like the British figurative painter Cicely Brown.  I like the strange stillness of Piero della Francesca.  

Freya describes painting: “the process of painting is like running my hand over the contours of the landscape.” These works are the images one would conjure up with the sting a trip left behind. Now in the face of her experience we as the viewer WANT to run our hands over the landscape she has reminiscently created. These images scream to be explained, to be written about, to be investigated.

Me:  Some paintings, in particular “Pinnacle” and “Cotopaxi” can be interpreted in many different ways. The fleshy tones of “Pinnacle” suggested to me a close up of a body part, and another gallery goer mentioned that “Cotopaxi” read like the inside of a flower. In your artist statement you say:

“Our memory of a place is altered by what was felt. There are mysteries behind the surface of what we take for reality and there are moments when we catch a glimpse of them.”

How do you feel about your paintings ability to evoke such a broad range of emotions and interpretations? Even though these are considered landscapes, (and with out a doubt are generally read as such), is it important to you that be regarded strictly as such, or can they be open to interpretation through the imagination of the viewer as something more abstract?

Freya: Because the source of these paintings is complex, it feels right that they would be perceived as embodying a broad range of feelings and associations.  Like all work that originates within, that comes from the heart, these paintings begin with emotion, with feeling.  The driving motivation is to make the feelings manifest in a physical form, to make objects, hopefully beautiful and powerful objects, not only so that the feeling can be shared with others, but so that I can understand them better myself.  So the view, the place where I saw what I saw, is a catalyst that begins the complex process of association.  What the viewer brings to the experience is their own dreams and memories and associations.  I am always interested in hearing what other people see.  It is part of the alchemy.

Freya says that it is the research that underlies her work, and this is apparent. The knowledge of lighting, perspective and shape, especially for these landscapes was a must to make these paintings successful. As part of the exhibit hang several studies or sketches of locations she has visited.

Me:  Your studies or sketches of locations are very formal, and thanks to G.R.A.C.E’s short documentary filmed at your studio I know that you use photographs and watercolors too. Do you employ the classic grid method to transfer your studies to canvas at all in your work? 

Freya:  The pencil drawings that serve as the working roadmap for the paintings are not done on site, but rather in my studio after I have assembled all of the materials that I gathered on the trip.  The time spent in making these drawings is the time when I am coalescing the myriad of impressions that I have gathered - the sketches, the written notes and photographs. While I am drawing I am constantly asking myself what that place was about for me. What was it that grabbed my attention, what was it that compelled me.  Because the ideas usually form around shape impressions (rather than light or color, for example), the drawings are my way of assembling the forms that spoke to me.  Once I have a drawing that I am happy with, that holds the potential that I envision, I begin drawing on the large canvas with oil pastel, just to block in the locations of the major shapes. These first outlines allow me to begin the under painting, and to refine the shapes and their relationships to each other. 

Me:  There were also a series of smaller paintings on paper that were framed.  Your past work with abstraction really shines through in these simple, confident landscapes. You show a restraint for shape in these and I really think they have been left at the perfect state where it is possible that they could have easily been overworked. Do you use these smaller paintings as a relief from larger work?

Freya:  The small paintings are interludes between the large canvasses.  The dramatic shift in scale from very large to very small does give me a refreshing shift, not only in focus but also in the way the paint is applied. They also give me a way to further explore some of the ideas I have been working with.  The tiny pieces always remind me of peering through a keyhole.  The whole world is still there, but it is compressed.

When you look at these paintings you must give time to be immersed in them, to imagine being there. To close your eyes even and let them take you into a world of your own. These paintings inspire a feeling, perhaps nostalgia that asks you to step into some of your own travels and revisit them. “The drive to give physical form to these experiences and to be able to share them is what motivates my work” Freya says in her artist statement.

Me:  You seem to have a certain color sense. As I walked through the exhibit I immediately noticed that the compositions were diversified, yet there was a consistency that strengthened the show. All great artists have a thumbprint to their artwork, and you certainly have that. I notice that you don’t really have high sunlight in your work, is there a reason for that? Am I wrong to say that they seem somewhat subdued versus bright? I don’t see any garish reds, or extreme bright yellows, but rather a well though out master plan to your approach to color.

Freya:  My color choices don’t spring from any formalistic theory or approach.  The choices are purely intuitive and are some combination of what was actually there and what the mood or atmosphere is that I am working with.  I don’t find myself drawn to bright sunny landscapes as a subject.  I love picnicking in bright sunshine, as do we all!  But when it comes to what moves me to paint, it is the moody and the evocative that hold my interest, that draw me into that internal conversation that I find compelling.

A writer for G.R.A.C.E used the word mystical to describe these works and I will have to use it again here. Even though there are no figurative characters to speak of the paintings still seem to speak and tell a story.

…“It begins my process of aligning shapes and forms and colors, much like creating characters in a play, bringing them onto the stage and giving them lines to speak.”

If you find your self at the town center in Reston, Virginia swing by G.R.A.C.E and talk a walk through “JOURNEY” and make some experiences for yourself.

For a behind the scenes look at the work, take a look at this interview with GRACE director Joanne Bauer HERE.

JOURNEY

Freya Grand

September 30 - November 12, 2010

 GRACE

12001 Market Street Suite 103
Reston, VA 20190

Phone: 703-471-9242
 Fax: 703-471-0952