INTRODUCTION

I met Nancy Friese 14 years ago while curating a significant art collection for a new headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island. Upon reflection, I realize that when I met Nancy, it seemed as though I had known her for a lifetime. With her deep knowledge and respect for nature and her effervescent enthusiasm for landscape art and artists, Nancy has an everlasting quality. Gifted as a highly trained painter and printmaker, Nancy has shared her work with us for over 40 years in important museum exhibitions across the globe. Her work brings joy to the viewer when shared in the public realm in museums as well as private collections.

Following the historic lineage of women painter-printmakers such as Mary Nimmo Moran (American, 1842-1899), and Margaret Kemp-Welch (British, 1874-1968) as well contemporaries such as painter Lois Dodd (American, b. 1927) and fellow Yale MFA Sylvia Plimack Mangold (American, b.1938), Friese adds a powerful body of monumental and gem-like oil paintings to our collective art world. At the exclusion of her substantial watercolors, monotypes, etchings, woodcuts and most recently hand-drawn lithographs, we made a conscious decision to focus on oil paintings from 1982 to 2022 in this catalogue.

There is wide recognition of Friese as one of our country’s most influential interpreters of American landscape, as well as European and Asian landscapes. Locations for paintings have included Giverny and Brittany in France, the North Dakota Badlands, the fields and groves in Long Island, New York, the rivers of Connecticut and the vast ocean views of southern Rhode Island. Invited to paint in renowned nature preserves and arboretums, she shows that land is precious and sacred, and the work brings preservation and conservation to mind. Nancy Friese’s eloquent paintings are a tangible outcome of memory, captivating a combination of weather, time, color, stroke, movement and atmosphere.

Special thanks to author and art historian, Susan Tallman, and British painter Eileen Hogan, for their fine contributions to this catalogue. Thank you to Nancy Friese for a phenomenal body of work, both paintings and prints, which we are so honored to exhibit and share with collectors, curators and museums.

- Cade Tompkins

Giverny, Gasny, France 1990

Claude Monet’s gardens

Foreword

Landscapes are not eternal. Their constituent parts—stones, trees, fungi, bugs and bunnies—grow and decay in cycles both far slower and far swifter than our own. They connect us to something larger than ourselves, which is salutary but not necessarily reassuring. Nancy Friese has been painting landscapes en plein air for more than four decades. In dappled shadow, blazing sun, and numbing cold, she has attended to the relations between light and leaf, turf and surf, in rockstrewn bits of the Rhode Island coast, a cove in France, a shrine in Japan, the North Dakota acreage her family has owned for generations.

This is a sublimely perverse thing to do in the twenty-first century, when it is possible to survey almost every bit of the globe with drones, phones and satellites from the comfort of climate-controlled interiors. But Friese’s boisterous clouds, fervent hues and gamboling squiggles are obviously about more than topography. The cliché is that such painting is really about the artist’s inner life—that the land merely an occasion for enumerating subjective emotional states. But this doesn’t feel right either. Her work hums with allegiance to the external world, its elements and energies, all busily pursuing their own agendas.

Subjectivity doesn’t bluster its way in with Expressionist gusto; it creeps in like ivy, making progress through myriad incremental actions. Returning to the same place at roughly the same time, day after day, week after week, she paints from a banquet of ephemeral perceptions— temperature, smell, air flow, sound as well as vision. She addresses the whole canvas on every visit, building up from initial swathes of color to calligraphic lines and jittery flecks that define and animate. Between each of these sessions, of course, the planet turns, snows melt, and deer dispatch greenery. What we, the viewers, see is neither a snapshot nor a fiction, but a strangely specific approximation.

the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views/Studioscape Program. Looking out the windows of a studio on the 91st floor, she painted her first city views—dozens of them—from above the clouds. She was not there when the first plane slammed into the North Tower, but her paintings were. From Within, Remembered View, 91st Floor, I, II and III were composed over the course of the following decade from memory, and with reference to photographs taken by another Studioscape artist. The window jambs in the pictures no longer exist, but what she pictures between them continues beyond 9/11: “the power of the clouds over the wiggly city below.”

History runs through Friese’s landscapes in many ways—there is the history of places altered, and also the history of art: there are echoes of Samuel Palmer in her rotund greenery and teeming surfaces; whispers of American Luminists in the eerie afterglow that hovers on her horizons; hints of an intrepid sisterhood of plein air painters stretching from Eliza Greatorex to Eileen Hogan. In the end, though, these scudding skies and restless leaves are distinctly, inimitably her own— enactments of being in a transient world, ecstatic and plangent in the same breath.

- Susan Tallman

Susan Tallman is an art historian and essayist who writes on contemporary art, printed images, and other areas of art and culture.

Photography, with its thin, time-stamped visual record, is irrelevant to this process, with one exception. Friese spent the summer of 2001 working in the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of

Last Light , 2022 oil on canvas • 40 x 54 inches

Before Evening , 2021 oil on canvas • 30 x 30 inches

Rim of Sunlight and Trees, 2016-17 diptych: oil on canvas • 50 x 100 inches

Summer Noon, 2013 oil on linen • 30 x 30 inches

From Within, Remembered View, 91st Floor I, II, III, 2002-2011 oil on linen • 30 x 30 inches each

Shrine Way, 1993 oil on linen • 24 x 35 inches

Afterword

At age six Nancy Friese, helped by her mother, painted a snow scene looking through the window of their log house on the cliffs of Lake Superior, Minnesota. By the time she was eight, due to her father’s work, she had lived in ten places across the United States. It does not take ingenious psychoanalysis to spot there may be connections between her childhood and the artistic path she has chosen. Throughout her career Nancy has found a “home” in her subject matter – the landscape that inspires her (most recently in Colorado, Connecticut, North Dakota and Rhode Island) and in her process, painting. She has wholeheartedly committed herself to being a figurative painter, during decades when figurative painting was unfashionable in the face of post-war abstraction, conceptualism, minimalism, and Pop Art, demonstrating that painting as a medium remains as alive as ever.

Nancy immerses herself in nature, taking her large canvases and huge pieces of paper into the landscape, working on the spot, almost becoming part of the topography. She often paints the same scene repeatedly and her distinctively vibrant and intricate images capture the passage of time and the changing of seasons.

When concern about damaging climate change is so urgent, Nancy’s implicit insistence on treating nature respectfully reminds us of the need to care for our environment and to commit ourselves to its survival.

- Eileen Hogan

Nancy Friese is a painter-printmaker who has worked in the open-air since 1976. Friese’s paintings and prints have been exhibited in more than 30 solo exhibitions and several hundred group exhibitions in prestigious museums both nationally and internationally. Nancy Friese is an elected National Academician in the National Academy of Design in New York City.

She was granted a Yale Norfolk School of Art summer fellowship and the Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Fellowship during her diploma studies at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (1977). She received an Anne Bremer Merit Award while studying in the Master of Arts painting program at the University of California-Berkeley (1978) and an Elizabeth Canfield Hicks

Award with her Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art (1980). At both Berkeley and Yale, Nancy Friese studied with a wide roster of luminaries including Elmer Bischoff, Sylvia Lark, Hassel Smith, Gabor Peterdi, Gretna Campbell, William Bailey, Winifred Lutz, Bernard Chaet and Rackstraw Downes. Friese has a Bachelor of Science degree from University of North Dakota.

Friese received two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowships; a six-month U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship residency in Tokyo; a six-month Lila Acheson Wallace Giverny Fellowship at Claude Monet’s home in France; a Blanche E. Colman Award; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award; and a George Sugarman Foundation Grant, all for painting. Artist’s Resource Trust (ART) funded her exhibition and residency at Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons University in Boston.

From 2001 up to 9/11, she had a studio on the 91st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views Residency Program and subsequently in 2022, she participated in the Council’s New Views: DUMBO residency program.

Her works are held in over 50 corporate, government, museum and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum at UCLA; Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas; The New York Public Library; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; RISD Museum, Rhode Island; National Academy of Design, New York; North Dakota Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut; Florence Griswold Museum, Connecticut; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest, France; and Museo Biblioteca La Casa del Libro, Puerto Rico.

For fourteen years, her paintings and prints have been represented by Cade Tompkins Projects. Tamarind Institute, Oehme Graphics, Mimosa Press, Sundog Multiples, and the University of Kansas have published her graphic works. In 2022, she returned to Millay Arts after 41 years. She has worked in more than 15 national and international residency programs, including Artists for the Environment, New Jersey; MacDowell, New Hampshire; Ragdale, Illinois; I-Park Foundation, Connecticut; Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Connecticut; Planting Fields Foundation, New York; Musée de Pont-Aven, France and Andy Warhol’s Montauk Nature Preserve in New York administered by The Nature Conservancy.

In 2022, Nancy’s work was exhibited in Yale University Art Gallery’s comprehensive exhibition and catalogue entitled On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale. The exhibition highlighted the remarkable achievements of women artists who graduated from Yale University.

Nancy Friese resides in Rhode Island and North Dakota.

Locations

Last Light, 2022

The Nature Conservancy • Narragansett, Rhode Island

Evening Quiet, 2022

Red River Valley, North Dakota

Snow on Ocean, 2021

Whale Rock Point, Narragansett, Rhode Island

Glittering Spring, 2021

River Road, Narragansett, Rhode Island

Endless Day, 2021

Red River Valley, North Dakota

Before Evening, 2021

Red River Valley, North Dakota

Long Summer Light, 2020

Red River Valley, North Dakota

Spring Arbor, 2017

Pawtuxet Cove, Rhode Island

Rim of Sunlight and Trees, 2016-17

Pawtuxet Cove, Rhode Island

Summer Noon, 2013

Bennington, Vermont

Muddy River, Emerald Necklace Trees and Reflections, 2009 The Emerald Necklace, The Fens, Boston, Massachusetts

Muddy River, Emerald Necklace Reflections, 2009 The Emerald Necklace, The Fens, Boston, Massachusetts

From the Hillside to the Sea, 2000

Pont-Aven, France

River and Cottonwoods, 2000

Red River, Lincoln Park, North Dakota

From Within, Remembered View, 91st Floor, I, 2002-2011

Lower Manhattan, New York

From Within, Remembered View, 91st Floor, II, 2002-2011

Lower Manhattan, New York

From Within, Remembered View, 91st Floor, III, 2002-2011

Lower Manhattan, New York

Wintertide, 1996

Pawtuxet Cove, Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island

Shrine, 1993

Fuchu, Tokyo, Japan

Summer Bluffs, 1992

Little Missouri River, The Badlands, Medora, North Dakota

Hills of Giverny, 1990

Giverny, France

Clouds Over the Bay, 1996

Pawtuxet Cove, Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island

Into the Sun II, 1989

Long Ridge Road, West Redding, Connecticut

Shrine Way, 1993

Fuchu, Tokyo, Japan

Riverbanks in Fall, 1982

Mill River, East Rock Park, New Haven, Connecticut