Bio:
Becky Frehse was born and raised in Illinois and spent her summers roaming freely on her father’s Boy Scout camp in the north woods of Wisconsin. After she earned a B.F.A. in painting and drawing at Arizona State University, she went to New York where she worked as a picture framer and as an artist in her shared, lower east side studio. In 1981, Becky moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to work as an artist’s studio assistant. She also learned to repair and restore wall murals in the colonial mansions of New England. Becky earned her M.F.A. in painting at Central Washington University and began her teaching career there while working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. After graduation, she traveled all over central and eastern Washington teaching and sharing her work as an Artist in Residence with the Washington State Arts Commission.
After returning from her time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1986, she taught for many years as an artist in residence at Pacific Lutheran University and later in the Art Department at the University of Puget Sound.
International travels and especially longer sojourns in China have significantly influenced Becky’s approach to painting and drawing. Her semi-abstract, mixed media work evolved from studying traditional Chinese painting techniques with Chinese landscape painters in Guangzhou and Chengdu. In 1995 she received an Artist Trust GAP grant to travel with the National Women’s Caucus for Art to present at the UN-NGO Conference on Women in Huairou, China.
Becky has had many solo shows since establishing her studio in Tacoma in 1986 and often participates in group shows and collaborations with other artists. Since 2010, she has been working with the ceramic artist Jane Kelsey-Mapel to create two and three-dimensional montages in an ongoing series of figurative sculptures collectively called ReConfigured. Twelve of their “reconfigured” pieces were featured at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in 2013. They exhibit together regularly at Practical Art Gallery in Phoenix.
In 2021, Becky exhibited large-scale paintings in a one-person show at Green River College called Tone Poems. Her studio practice also involves repurposing musical instruments and integrating them together with tree branches and paintings as mixed media constructions in site-specific installations. Becky also creates sculptural artist-books with found objects. Her book “Tunisian Blues” is part of the artist books archive at the Central Washington University library in Ellensburg, Washington.
Artist Statement:
I am a mixed-media painter and assemblage artist whose work includes painting, drawing, site-specific installations, and sculptural artist books created with found objects. My deep engagement with materials in eclectic bodies of work manifests in visual narratives that borrow ideas from classical music, the natural world, and my experiences as a life-long traveler.
My ongoing Tone Poem series of paintings explores the romantic beauty of water in different locations and seasons. Like musical tone poems that abstractly evoke the feeling of a particular place or time, my paintings use the poetics of color and mark-making patterns as musical notation embedded within fields of musical staff lines. The horizontal staff lines appear and disappear throughout the composition suggesting stability within a multifarious pictorial space. I work out the narrative possibilities of a composition with gradual shifts of color and loads of collage and textural paint qualities.
In landscape painting, I am influenced by traditional Chinese landscape painters’ use of non-linear arrangements of spatial depth where foregrounds elongate into multiple, invented middle grounds and change into open spaces that run off the top of the picture plane. One enjoys the sensation of looking up and down and traveling through mixed pictorial spaces rather than to a singular destination.
In my studio practice I strive to convey a sense of wonder and moments of beauty of that will resonate with my audience.
