NEICY FREY
BIO
Neicy Frey 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 artwork draws inspiration from her childhood experiences in Southeast Asia, the natural world, music and people.
Over the years Neicy has worked as an independent artist and designer with companies like Anthropologie, Serena & Lily, Chairish, and Trader Joe’s. Neicy's paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions around the Pacific Northwest USA, and are held in private collections worldwide. Neicy lives and works 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 the canvas and interact with each other in a way that tells a story or holds a particular feeling.
I was impressed with a myriad of visual influences from 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, I expressed this in my work in more literal ways with my color palette and subject matter. As I get older and the memories become more distant, the influences have grown more abstract.
Being raised cross-culturally fostered an ability to zoom out to the dreamy place of the observer, developing skills of holding a narrative and sense of self in the midst of extremely unrelated environments. I would say the greater influence in my work now is that dreamy space outside of time and environments. It’s the place of being an outsider, but also feeling at home in the whole world.
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 work on many paintings at a time, sometimes up to 15 pieces. Moving from piece to piece helps me give each artwork time to settle energetically between layers. Each layer of paint feels to me like a chapter in a book, unfolding 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 of their aesthetic—it’s never a straight line from start to finish.
instagram @neicyfrey