Biographical Information:
I grew up in the hills of Sherman Oaks in its more rural days - hiking trails, climbing trees, building tree houses - and living in a house being constructed around me. We were a family of “makers” - my father, a very creative electronic engineer, designed and built our house around us in his spare time, room by room. He also built almost everything inside it - repeatedly reminding and reinforcing “we can make one better than anything we might buy.” My mother was an art and music lover, and between them I grew up drawing, playing violin and believing I was helping my dad build our house.
I focused on both art and music at Cal State University at Northridge, where I studied under Hans Burkhardt, Saul Bernstein, Robert Brown and Ernest Fried, earning a BA Degree in Art in drawing, printmaking and photography.
After 20 years raising my daughters and working as an online banking programmer, I made a career switch to freelance graphic/web design. My art, music and programming background helped me build a clientele of 70+ renowned musicians, composers, conductors, visual artists and related businesses. With a clientele that included award winning, legendary jazz musicians across the US and Europe, I customized each work to reflect each artist’s creative output - highly visual, including illustration, digital special effects and programming. Several projects were named featured works and Best of the Year in critics polls. Collaboration played a major role, both as a team player in my earlier corporate work and as a freelancer, collaborating with my clients, their agents and record labels, and other artists and designers.
Throughout these years I continued regular figure drawing, explored media, styles and approaches. Upon retirement I’ve returned to fine art on a full time basis. My work is essentially figurative and focused on an explorative process in which I build a scenario and narrative intuitively. Most recently I’ve started exploring the relationships and tension that exists in the space between realism, fantasy and abstraction.
Artist Statement:
Those following a path of regular art practice will likely encounter Creativity’s ally, Uncertainty. While exploring the creative terrain, at times much of it feels like groundless space, but with a degree of curiosity, we come to realize it’s right where we need to be as artists. The feeling of uncertainty is not our private domain however. It affects everyone from time to time, and I’m curious to explore how that groundless, fragile feeling plays upon the complexity of our inner layers and becomes visible at the surface. My art is primarily figurative, focusing on our moments of fleeting self-doubts, memories, dreams... as well as our moments of insight.
My early art training focused on figure drawing, copying the Old Masters and studying art history both Western and Eastern. I still have a tremendous love and craving for art history - all periods and cultures. And while I work in a variety of different media, as well as non-representationally, it is the human figure and the feeling of abrasive media against paper that resonates the deepest within me, whether based on live models, memory or imagination. Figure drawing has remained a constant practice through my busy years while raising two daughters and working as an online banking systems programmer and continued as I made a career shift to freelance graphic & web design.
Recently I’ve become curious to build narrative scenarios as a means of investigating our moments of both disorientation and open clarity, as well as the subjectivity of our perception - the real, the remembered, the imagined, the dreamed, both the wondrous and frightening. I build the narrative quite intuitively, adding elements and layers containing intentional ambiguities to heighten intrigue and curiosity, prompting us to ask “What is happening? What are we really perceiving and feeling?” It is my hope that my artwork will prompt curiosity and introspection. I post work in progress in my blog and social media.
Thank you so much for visiting this page! For more information, please visit my website: www.judyfrisk.com
