Charlotte Frieze’s spare, reductive seascapes are at once serene and mesmerizing. Garden designer, landscape architect, author and teacher, Frieze has recently turned to painting with watercolor. Frieze’s group of 15 clean, luminous, blue washes on view in Washington are glowing, economical gem-like musings on the vastness of sea and sky.
Charlotte Frieze began her career as garden editor at “House and Garden” magazine, and then became Landscape Associate at Robert AM Stern Architects in New York City. Frieze is the author of the book, “Private Paradise, Social Gardens” and also the book series “The Zone Garden.” Currently a resident of Los Angeles, Frieze is a founder of the Malibu Open Space Alliance, embracing conservation and ecology along with writing, teaching and expressing her artistic vision.
Frieze and her husband began spending summers in Little Compton, R.I. about 30 years ago, with the magnetic force of the Atlantic Ocean exerting a powerful gravitational pull on the artist and writer. In 2012 she traveled south along the Atlantic coastline to Brazil, there continuing her musing on the nearly incomprehensible vastness and infinite possibility of seascape.
The collection of fifteen waterscapes on view comprise vistas captured between four years, 2010-2014, from Rhode Island through Turks and Caicos, down to Brazil. One has to wonder about the pull of the Atlantic in particular, or ocean in general. But what is most significant is the sense of infinite expansiveness and possibility: Frieze’s seascapes represent the power of the sea and the quixotic, magical possibility of meteorology. The artist describes her experience as a kind of spiritual meditation; a centering inquiry into expansiveness, peace and possibility.
The artist is fascinated, mesmerized even, by the qualities of light and time; how changeable light is from moment to moment, the natural alchemy of climate, weather and atmosphere. Hers is a vernacular of delicacy and minimalism, a kind of post modern Impressionism. The artist uses two, three, sometimes four washes on a given sheet of paper in order to achieve the desired effect of line and pigment wash. It’s as if she composes a poem in watercolor: we instantly know what she is suggesting, but we only see a few spare strokes and a gorgeous bleeding of pigment. The effect is of a glowing, emanating seascape with the line between sea and sky like a kind of horizontal plum line. We get closer to see more clearly, to really look, and then all we see is gorgeous color and a few suggestions of form, without any real lines: Visual haiku.
The show remains up through April 25th. All installed work is presented and sold framed, with unframed folios available for purchase as well. These intimate, magical watercolors measure between 4-12 inches by 12-20 inches and are priced between $1225-$1725.
Charlotte Frieze, “Atlantic High” is at KMR Arts, 2 Titus Rd. Washington Depot, Conn., www.kmrarts.com.
