Fritha Strand

Strand’s paintings explore the sensory fields of land, sky, water, and the body — spaces where gesture, color, and breath converge. Through brushwork, line, and layered surfaces, form emerges intuitively, often suggesting terrain that is both landscape and flesh — atmosphere carries emotion. In her recent botanical cannabis series and smoking still lifes, Strand continues this inquiry into intimacy and perception. The plant is rendered not as an object but as presence, smoke becomes another kind of landscape: ephemeral, drifting, and bodily, echoing the rhythms of breath and release. Strand works primarily in acrylic, aerosol, charcoal and chalk pastel on canvas or board, allowing the materials to guide the process. She embraces accidents, unfinished edges, and impulsive marks as a way of discovering the painting rather than controlling it. Her work exists between realism and abstraction, where sensation takes precedence over representation. Ultimately, Strand’s paintings invite viewers inward — to inhabit the space between form and feeling, to breathe with the work, and to encounter landscapes as emotional and physical terrain.

I am curious about the sensory fields of sky, land, and water. They can provide sensualities of space through brushwork, color, and composition; through line and tone, shape is created, much like the body of a lover. At times, I have intentionally left ends unfinished as a visual depiction of the lack of closure throughout life, especially when relationships change or end – terrains within themselves. If landscape paintings can suggest the body (by body, I mean mass of all kinds), then poetry can be the breath, each assisting the other to ultimately allow grief. Acrylic, spray paint, and chalk pastels are the media I use, typically on canvas or board. I like to give the material and media some control, embracing mess-ups or rash decisions in an attempt to discover the painting. My work is not meant to look real, or abstract, but in between. I hope you will open yourself, go within, to the edges of what could be, simultaneously breathing deeply.