Location: North Yorkshire
Art Medium: Mixed Media
Education:
B.A (Hons) Fine Art, First Class
Born in Bath and currently living in North Yorkshire, Freya has been working and exhibiting as a professional artist for over 20 years. She has a first class degree in Fine Art and has taught at degree, foundation and secondary school level. Her work is exhibited in galleries across the UK.
Freya spends a lot of time outside with her sketchbook, capturing shapes and moods of land and sea, before taking this back to the studio to paint. Her work is led by her response to landscape, but she also lets the painting itself guide her process, following the movement of the paint on canvas and responding to marks as she makes them. Her paintings begin their life on the floor, where she pours and drips liquid paint onto the canvas, tilting it to allow the paint to find it’s own path. This part of the process is free, dynamic and unpredictable by it’s very nature and Freya aims to retain this feeling in the finished work. She uses a wide range of materials and experimental techniques within her work, building up textured, multi layered surfaces that result in free and expressive paintings the viewer can truly get lost in.
“ Led by my responses to landscape, light and weather and also by the process of painting itself, I make paintings that refer to both the permanent elemental nature of land and a more ephemeral sense of fluidity and change”
Artist Statement
“Central to my work is the idea of permanence and change in the landscape. I explore the elemental nature of land – mountains, moors and rocks – and the more transient effects of light and weather and the ever-moving, ever-changing nature of the sea. I am fascinated by the fleeting and enigmatic changes which rain, mist, sunlight, cloud, snow bring to the face of the land.
I love to draw outside in the landscape, and take my sketchbooks everywhere I travel, both home and abroad, watching the light and weather change over the moors or listening to the comfortingly incessant sounds of waves and gulls on a deserted beach. The separation involved in making the paintings back in the studio is equally important, however, allowing me to approach the work freely, as a painting rather than as a detailed record. Rather than portraits of particular places, they are more an attempt to distil a memory of a space, with its light, weather and sounds, leaving them open to other interpretations and perceptions.
Whatever the starting point, the paintings are part of my ongoing exploration of using the physicality of paint in many ways to evoke the more intangible nature of light and space. Using a very wide range of media, the paintings begin life on the floor, building up fluid layers of poured paint and all the unpredictability that brings. In subsequent layers, I try to direct and harness this unpredictability to some extent, responding to the marks and to my own sense of the space that emerges. Gradually I refine the techniques, adding, taking away, scraping back and adding again, revealing marks from every stage of the process. My painting practice is active, expressive, direct, but there are also quieter more analytical moments of gently directing fluid paint or carefully sanding back to find and place earlier marks alongside later ones.”
Freya Horsley
Work represented by us:
Paintings: Freya Horsley
Website: www.freyahorsley.com Instagram:@freyahorsleyart