NEICY FREY
BIO
Neicy Frey (b. 1972) is a self-taught artist who funnels years of experimenting with art in various styles and mediums into her bold and elemental large-scale oil paintings. Intricate scenes are distilled into hard-edge abstractions with orchestrated color palettes and engaging compositions.
Neicy's paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions around the Pacific Northwest USA, and are held in private collections worldwide. Over the years Neicy has also worked as an independent artist and designer with companies like Anthropologie, Serena & Lily, Chairish, and Trader Joe’s. Neicy currently works as a full-time studio artist in Spokane, Washington USA.
STATEMENT
My focus is on creating dynamic arrangements of shapes, colors and values. I like to make interlocking shapes that seem to move across and around the canvas, interacting with each other, all in a way that tells a story or holds a particular feeling.
I was impressed with a myriad of visual influences during my childhood in South India and Malaysia, and I am often drawing from a reservoir of vibrant colors and traditional decorative motifs from Indian, Malay and Chinese cultures. When I was younger, this showed up in my work in more literal ways with my color palette and subject matter. As I get older and those memories become more distant, the influences have become more abstract.
Being raised cross-culturally cultivated my ability to zoom out to the dreamy place of the observer. I learned to hold a narrative and sense of self in the midst of extremely unrelated environments. Navigating this dreamy space outside of time and environments has been the greatest influence for my work.
PROCESS
Each of my paintings holds numerous fine layers of oil paint that are made with small brushstrokes on the canvas. This process of layering gives the work a luscious, velvety texture that is interesting without distracting from the bold elemental shapes. Slight color from underlying layers is sometimes revealed at the surface, lending depth and character.
I like to work on many paintings at a time. Moving from piece to piece gives each artwork time to settle energetically between layers. Each layer of paint feels like a chapter in a book, opening to reveal more of the narrative and bringing forward instructions for next steps in the painting process. Sometimes I use older canvases with half-painted works as a base for my new paintings. The paintings almost always have a meandering evolution to their aesthetic—it’s never a straight line from start to finish.
instagram @neicyfrey