Bio:
Becky Frehse was born in Illinois and spent her summers living with her family at a Boy Scout camp in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. She attended high school in Rockford, Illinois and took off for backpacking around Europe before attending college at Arizona State University where she graduated with a BFA in Painting and Drawing in 1980. After working in a framing shop in New York City, she worked as a studio assistant to a painter in Portsmouth, New Hampshire who encouraged her to attend Central Washington University where Becky earned her M.F.A. in Painting in 1984.
*Her sculptural, artist book My Tunisia is now in the permanent collection in the Special Archives at Central Washington University Library.
Becky’s studio work spans painting and drawing, site-specific installations, and sculptural book arts. She has had nineteen solo shows since 1987 when she staged “My Tunisia” at Pacific Lutheran University. And she has exhibited in many group shows at galleries, colleges, cooperative and community art galleries in the Northwest.
The Helen S. Smith Gallery at Green River College in Auburn, Washington was the site of Becky’s most recent solo show in 2021. Tone Poems featured ten large-scale paintings inspired by observing her backyard pond and garden during the pandemic. In 2022, her work was included in shows at Gallery 110 in Seattle, Childhood’s End Gallery in Olympia, and South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia.
Becky’s site-specific, public installations have been featured in many places around Puget Sound; Soaring and Col Legno in the Woolworth Windows on Broadway in Tacoma—also part of Tacoma’s Light Trail project in 2021-22; The 9th Street Reconciliation Orchestra in the 9th in Tacoma in 2020, Fiddle Woods at Art on Main in Auburn, Ensemble I and II at The Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington, and Music Box in the Woolworth Windows in 2014.
Some of Becky’s awards include a nomination for the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation’s Annual Art Award, a grant from Tacoma Artist Initiative Projects (TAIP), and an Artist Trust GAP Grant to participate with the National Women’s Caucus for Art in China in 1995.
Becky has had a professional studio practice in Tacoma since 1986. She has enjoyed a long career as an arts educator; including Artist in Residence and Lecturer at Pacific Lutheran University, Middle School Art Teacher at Charles Wright Academy, Artist in Residence with Washington State Arts Commission. Since retiring from teaching in the Art Department at the University of Puget Sound in 2019, Becky teaches privately in her studio.
Artist Statement:
My studio practice is about searching for images and solving visual problems. I move freely between abstraction and representation and enjoy the process of discovery.
In 2010, I was listening to my composer husband and musician daughters speak together. They communicated in a musical language I didn’t understand. I began to conceive of a painting as a visual musical score using horizontal “staff” lines inscribed in the preliminary gesso layers of a canvas. This systematic, linear structure became the underpinning on which I could play with color transitions, invented shapes, and patterns of marks to create abstract compositions. Gestural drawing with thick paint and collage material created dramatic textural surfaces. I was free of figuration while I enjoyed interpreting musical ideas visually.
The abstract notion of a painting as a visual musical score has evolved as I now explore landscape painting within a series called Tone Poems. The “tone poem” concept is borrowed from music in which a musical piece without words describes a particular event or narrative. By retaining the musical score lines within a landscape composition, I am free to defy conventions of linear perspective. I play with other methods for suggesting the sensations and dimensions of landscape spaces including stacking them vertically, a technique I learned by studying traditional Chinese painting. My engagement with the ephemeral nature of water and its botanical “edges” is an ongoing fascination for me as well.
Ultimately, I am interested in the narrative and metaphoric possibilities within a painting. Thus, I often rely on collage elements. Violin and cello strings sewn onto the canvas with embroidery thread may suggest greater spatial depths, but also drifting sounds. Assorted found materials, scraps of text on paper, and detritus from humans and nature can serve to imply both meaning and visual interest.
In the end, I remain mindful of the original staff lines as they disappear and reappear as each composition resolves itself.