Nancy Fritz

“Everyday Muses,” paintings

These paintings move away from the more stylized expressionistic paintings of my last show, to ones that (while they still have a narrative quality and still locate a figure in some imagined emotional space) now employ aspects of portraiture and utilize real women (usually my daughters, sometimes a sister, or myself) as models. I think of these paintings as mostly fictional….culled memories, familiar people and objects—juxtaposed to create something compelling and separate from the model and her reality. But I like to imagine also that the images contain a “meta-reality”—an essential emotional truth that attaches, not just to the girl/woman of each painting, but to the small epiphanies of awareness that come sometimes when you really look at someone you love…the everyday muses in our lives.