Nancy Friese, Red River , 2007. Watercolor. Nancy Friese: Encircling Trees and Radiant Skies Activities and Lessons North Dakota Museum of Art Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................... ii A Guide for Viewing Artwork............................................................................................. 1 Previsit Activity/Lesson Plan: Look! Think! Discuss ............................................................ 2 Learning about Art Activity/Lesson One: Three Steps to Viewing Artwork ........................................................ 4 Activity/Lesson Two: A Closer Look.................................................................................... 6 Activity/Lesson Three: Writing About Art ........................................................................... 8 Learning about Watercolor Activity/Lesson Four: Adding Texture to Watercolor with Salt ............................................ 10 Watercolor Vocabulary....................................................................................................... 11 Activity/Lesson Five: Watercolor Wax Resist Painting ........................................................ 12 Activity/Lesson Six: Warm and Cool Watercolor: Cities on the Sea .................................... 13 Learning about Printmaking Activity/Lesson Seven: Printmaking 101 ............................................................................ 14 Printmaking Vocabulary .................................................................................................... 15 Activity/Lesson Eight: Printmaking with Puzzles................................................................. 16 A Brief Overview of Printmaking....................................................................................... 17 Learning about Landscapes Activity/Lesson Nine: Looking at Landscapes – Describing................................................. 18 Looking at Landscapes Vocabulary..................................................................................... 19 Activity/Lesson Ten: Looking at Landscapes – Finding Yourself in a Landscape................... 20 The 7 Elements of Art ........................................................................................................ 22 The 9 Principles of Design ................................................................................................ 23 Activity/Lesson Eleven: Introducing Line ........................................................................... 25 Activity/Lesson Twelve: Introducing Shape......................................................................... 27 Teacher Evaluation ........................................................................................................... 28 Note: For your convenience, North Dakota Common Core Standards and Achievement Standards are included in the Previsit Lesson and Lesson One. Subsequent Lessons and Activities meet several state and federal education standards as well. Nancy Friese: Encircling Trees and Radiant Skies Activities and Lessons North Dakota Museum of Art Page i Introduction: Nancy Friese: Encircling Trees and Radiant Skies A sense of the local is central to Nancy Friese’s work, wherein she documents places and events that are specific and personal, while offering them up to be shared by the viewer. Friese is a landscape artist, and though she lives and works most of the year in Rhode Island, she spends part of each summer in rural Buxton, North Dakota, on the land her great-grandfather homesteaded when he emigrated from Norway. It is land she has drawn again and again, depicting its expansive fields and seemingly endless skies, sometimes in vivid paint and sometimes in intimate etched lines. Summers end and the artist returns to the East Coast to continue developing her images, sometimes as prints, but also oil paintings on canvas and watercolors on paper that might measure up to nine feet wide as two-panel diptychs, or five feet high, or as small as thirty by thirty inches. A print virtuoso, she produces work as woodcuts, etchings, drypoints, linocuts and monotypes, or combinations of printmaking techniques. The artist has a long and enduring relationship with North Dakota and the North Dakota Museum of Art. She served on the Museum’s Board of Trustees during the late 1990s. Prior to this exhibition, the Museum mounted a show of Friese’s early wood engravings. She also donates prints from her own collection to the Museum. In 2011, she invited Museum Director Laurel Reuter to collaborate with her on the print portfolio in this exhibition, “Tumbling Time.” Given her habit of painting and drawing from direct observation outdoors, she etched the copper plates for the portfolio in the fields and woodlands surrounding her summer home in Buxton. In 2002, Nancy Friese curated the exhibition “Remembering New York” for the North Dakota Museum of Art. Friese was one of nine landscape artists who lost their 91st floor studios in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Friese commuted on weekends from Rhode Island to her studio within the larger studio, huddled like all the rest, up against the windows. Laurel Reuter had made a studio visit only a month before September 11, 2001, the day the Towers died. Deeply etched in her memory was the sense of absolute silence above such a vast and teeming city. Watching the Towers go down from a hotel in Romania, Reuter worried about Friese. Days later, an e-mail made it through. Friese was accounted for; the paintings were all gone. According to Reuter, “Nancy reminded me of people who had gone through the 1997 flood; she seemed in a state of shock. So we cooked up the idea of an aftermath exhibition and Nancy went back to work. Collaborating with her fellow artists to salvage, recreate, or make new work, Friese opened the show on August 13, 2002 and seven artists came. For her own contribution, Friese chose to frame fragments of the city within the Trade Center’s window casements. These slices of cityscape are crowned with billowing, shifting, life-filled clouds befitting the descendent of a famous plains weatherman, the legacy of a child raised among family to whom weather mattered. From the Artist “Equivalents of nature’s forms, colors, lights, textures and spaces synthesize to approximate a chosen view. Landscape painting is a composite of things seen, remembered and felt. By studying nature’s phenomena, I tie the visual observations to experience. A unified surface is created by incremental decisions representing the outward world. With unpeopled views, scenes and vistas, one can enter a more philosophical, personal and timeless place. The paintings and prints are of nature close at hand from bays, fields, treetops, and skies. When resolution occurs, the viewer can stand parallel to the artist”. Biography Nancy Friese entered the University of North Dakota in 1966 and left in 1970 as a registered nurse. It was art, however, which claimed her: a BA from the Cincinnati Art Academy, a year at Berkeley in the graduate painting program, and ultimately an MFA in printmaking from Yale. For years, she was head of printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design while working as a full-time artist. The recipient of several prestigious competitions and awards, Friese was elected to the National Academy (Museum and School in New York City) and received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, including the Japan-US Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellowship. She was granted a Lila Acheson Wallace Giverny Fellowship, a Blanche E. Colman Award, Pollock-Krasner Foundation funding and a George Sugarman Foundation Grant for painting. Artist’s Resource Trust (A.R.T.) funded her exhibition and residency at Trustman Gallery. Friese has shown in 170 group shows and thirty solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Nancy Friese: Encircling Trees and Radiant Skies Activities and Lessons North Dakota Museum of Art Page ii A Guide for Viewing Artwork The following activities and lessons rely on three basic methods of visual analysis: description, formal analysis, and interpretation. These methods provide a structure for viewing, analyzing, and writing about visual art. For the purposes of explaining the methods of visual analysis, let’s look at the image below . The same methods can be applied to analyzing any image or artwork. Description The first step in visual analysis is description. Describing an image is a useful technique for looking closely at an image and absorbing its details. Descriptions should try and remain objective, discussing what can be seen without drawing conclusions about an artwork’s meaning. For instance, when looking at Red River , it would be appropriate to say, "The trees grow closely together," but it would be inappropriate to say "I think this is a happy place." This sort of subjective comment should be reserved for the interpretation stage. A description can begin anywhere, but generally it is easiest to begin by discussing the subject matter. For example, a description of this image might begin with the basic statement, "This image is of a forest." Once you have stated the subject matter, simply elaborate on what you can see: "There are four trees in the foreground. There is an open field behind those trees. In the distance, there is a forest. The sky is full of clouds.” Nancy Friese, Red River , 2007. Watercolor. Formal Analysis After looking carefully