Working consistently as a plein-air artist for the past thirty years, Nancy Friese's work captures the natural spontaneity and intertwining of clusters of trees and foliage beneath lively skies. Friese's work departs from traditional plein-air painting with heightened color and animated brush strokes. Friese has been invited to paint at many distinguished arboretums and national land trust such Planting Fields Arboretum, Oyster Bay, Long Island; Giverny, Gasny, France; Westerly Land Trust, Rhode Island, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Medora, North Dakota to name a few.
Each oil on canvas, watercolor, etching, woodcut, or lithograph is a layered depiction of a landscape that Friese visits several times, with large sheets of lanagravure paper, huge stretched canvas or copper plates over the course of its completion. These visits are reflected in the subtle light and shadows of each work that capture a bright spot of summer sun and inky covering of a coming storm. The paintings sometimes feature a tumultuous sky filled with clouds in shades of royal blue, purples and grays that compliment the vibrant greens, yellow, and pinks of the landscape reminding the viewer of the power of nature juxtaposed with the beauty of the land. Friese's mastery of color and brush create paintings filled with texture, depth, and flashes of movement.
Nancy Friese received her BS from the University of North Dakota, and her MFA from Yale University. She also studied in the Graduate Program at the University of California Berkeley where she was a student of painter Elmer Bischoff. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the Japan-US Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellowship.
Friese was granted a Yale University Summer School of Music and Art at Norfolk Fellowship, Anne Bremer Award, and Wilder Traveling Fellowship during her artistic studies. She received a six- month Lila Acheson Wallace Giverny Fellowship, a Blanche E. Colman Award, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and a George Sugarman Foundation Grant for painting.
