BIO
Britt Freda has been drawing and painting for as long as she has memory. She received a double degree with honors in fine art and writing from St. Lawrence University in New York. In addition, Freda studied painting, drawing and photography at Lorenzo de' Medici Institute of Art in Florence, Italy and by invitation for intensive residency study at La Cipressaia in Montagnana, Italy under internationally acclaimed South African artists Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky.
Since 2011 Britt has focused the majority of her painting on endangered species. Her work was included in the 2013-2015 Environmental Impact U.S. museum tour and is part of the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s permanent collection. Britt’s work is exhibited at galleries across the country. From a small farm on an island in the Pacific Northwest, with her family by her side, Britt searches the horizon looking toward future generations.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings have been influenced by a lifelong fascination, awe and reverence for the natural world. Michele Corriel, Art & Architecture, 2014 wrote "[Britt Freda’s paintings] ask us to travel not only the roads we see but the ones we’ve lost along the way.” While my subjects are rooted in realism, the closer the viewer gets one will discover my surfaces are regularly imbedded with etched words, statistics, poems, maps or seedpods. The elements that are layered between patterns of color are usually circuitously referential of environmental elements (seed pods, petals, cellular structures...).
From afar we are practiced at not questioning what we see, but up close where wrinkles and freckles and the flecks of color in a person's iris are visible, so much more is revealed. I want the same to be true with my paintings. There is something intimate about getting closer, to a painting or to a person. In close proximity the subjects of my paintings begin to dis-solve (also read: to un-explain) becoming blocks of color and marred patterns which I hope nudges the mind to dissolve preconceived notions and to remember “roads” we may have forgotten.
When I feel they are successful, my paintings are about the play of puzzles and discovery, about learning and re-membering (also read: coming together). In that space where breath can be heard or felt there is more to see, to hear, to be touched by, to comprehend. It is there that the world becomes more complex and layered and interesting and riddled with stories that unite us as living beings. And the more pieces there are to play with! Beauty is found in so many unexpected places, even in those wrinkled, scratched, worn chunks of color. Up close the familiar beigns to look foreign and the foreign, familiar.
Look.
Dis-cover.
Learn.
Past paintings of bees, owls, the notion of home, our collective future--but mostly looking into the eyes of my children--led me to my current series on endangered species. While the subject matter isn’t always easy I hope that you are, in one hand, seduced by sumptousness while simultaneously holding in the other hand the knowledge that we are indivisible from our natural environment, and ultimately, from each other.
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