BRITT FREDA Largely influenced by a lifelong fascination, awe and reverence for the natural world Britt Freda’s paintings “ask us to travel not only the roads we see but the ones we’ve lost along the way.” (Michele Corriel, Art & Architecture, 2014). Freda's subjects, rooted in realism, are regularly imbedded with etched words, statistics, poems, maps or seedpods layered into a surface of patterns referential of environmental elements. “I am visually and conceptually drawn to the scratches, drips and dirt of the understories exposed in a surface abstracted by one’s perspective. Scratches and graphite grit are revealed as the viewer gets intimately nearer to the painting. In close proximity blocks of color and marred patterns visually begin to dis-solve the subject, and thus dissolve notions of what a mind has preconceived,” says Freda. "These paintings are about learning. From afar a thing can seem clear, even simple, but the closer a person gets, the more there is to see, to hear, to feel, to comprehend, the more complex and layered and riddled with stories the world becomes. In life, beautiful details are found in those wrinkled, scratched, worn chunks of color. Look for them. Learn." Past paintings of bees, owls, the notion of home and her children led the artist into her current series on endangered species. Freda says, “by revealing hints of the messy and complicated beneath the beauty, we are reminded that we are indivisible from our natural environment or, ultimately, from each other.” Britt Freda has been drawing and painting for as long as she has memory. She received a double degree with honors in fine art and writing from St. Lawrence University in New York. In addition, Freda studied painting, drawing and photography at Lorenzo de' Medici Institute of Art in Florence, Italy and by invitation for intensive residency study at La Cipressaia in Montagnana, Italy under internationally acclaimed South African artists Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky. Freda's paintings have won critical acclaim. Her work is found in private collections, galleries and museum exhibitions nationwide. The artist presently lives with her two children on Vashon Island in Washington.