Nancy Fritz
I am a figurative painter and a long-time member of ARC Gallery, a woman-run gallery in Chicago. I am fascinated by color and form--but also by the stories paintings can suggest. In my most recent series of paintings, I am less interested in unique identities—and more interested in how a figure-shaped splotch of color communicates something that we all understand—a sort of semiotic language available to us because we are human. The figures in these latest paintings sit/dance together—sometimes uncomfortably. But they are not alone. I nestle these human-ish shapes within a background of bird, tree, and plant-ish shapes—some of which seem on fire, some are perhaps dying. There is a darkness to some of these paintings; but the figures in them nevertheless are connected to each other—in a unity that defines them. They exist within a community, an ecosystem—they are not without hope.
