Daybreak: Nancy Friedland

 

Nancy Friedland’s solo exhibition, DAYBREAK, represents a broad shift in the focus of her work from night to day: “I’ve spent a lot of my painting life trying to paint the dark, trying to paint different light sources, moonlight, candlelight, fireworks. I’ve become enchanted by other qualities of light, moments that happen just before the night comes on or just after the sun rises. There’s just more to paint when there’s light. This past winter has been bleak. I mean, literally bleak. No sun. For days and days. And so I painted the sun.” Working with photographs as source material, Friedland is drawn to the surprises in the flawed translation from one medium to the next. Using her phone camera, she collects images frequently populated by family members, friends, and animals in predominantly outdoor settings with specific light situations. Reminiscent of screenshots from films, her compositions are masterfully unassuming, allowing the viewer to sink quickly into them. The quality of light- and the way everything is defined by it- communicates the sense of the air and sound and scent of very specific spaces. Friedland’s confident hand produces unfussed-with, physical marks combined with masterful glazes that capture the visceral sense of the kind of photographs that read as a microsecond in time. Speaking with Nancy gives a similar feeling—she loves to get to the point. It’s as if in her work and life are interwoven throughout every moment of the day, like the depiction of a millisecond where a child emerges exuberantly from the water into the sun in SAY YES. The child’s face is so bright that it melts into light, obscuring their features. Sparkles of water create a crown/halo and their arms open beatifically like a depiction of saint in a state of ecstasy- or surrender. Rising towards us, the figure pushes the water out in concentric waves that move to and beyond the edges of the picture plane. Bliss brings about meaning. The title reminds us to live in a state of action, like Yoko Ono’s Yes installation that John Lennon said made him fall in love with her. 

 

Family members populate many of these works- including parents doing things like canoeing and gardening. Her daytime work often tips into blazing light in the same way that the nighttime works melt into/out of darkness. Natural spaces and times of day are defined by light and darkness. Humans or animals the focus, often in the center, but they don’t feel centered. Instead, her works relate like family snapshots in their humble presence, pressing into our space through fast and gorgeous paint marks that look like they’re made at the speed of a camera shutter. I completely forget that these are someone else’s family: I see my mother in her garden, my children swimming, my awe at the way light moves through outdoor spaces. There is a famous painting by the illustrator and masterful painter Maxfield Parrish that is called Daybreak. This too is not only Friedland’s exhibition title but it is title to a work where a figure is seen silhouetted against the side of the house, raising their hand up to shield their eyes from the sun (actually it’s a self-portrait and her hand is taking a picture, and her back is to the sun). The same hand gesture is depicted in Parrish’s piece by a reclining figure on a majestic columned porch with another figure bending down towards them and they gaze with subtle smiles of wonder at each other against a backdrop of a gorgeous morning landscape. In Friedland’s DAYBREAK ,the shared awe is between viewer and painter, creating a true moment in time.