Nancy Friese

Wingate Studio is pleased to announce the release of Summer’s Close, a new five-plate aquatint etching by Nancy Friese, drawn directly from the landscape and created outdoors, on location, on coated copper.

The title carries two meanings: “summer’s ending,” as the season gives way to fall, and “summer is close,” suggesting the season’s warmth and presence still at hand. Together, they hold the arc of summer between arrival and departure, presence and passing.

The landscape looks westward toward a distant horizon in the shifting light of late afternoon and early twilight. Sentinel-like trees frame the composition as a gravel road recedes diagonally into yellowing fields. Backlit trees line the horizon, while grasses, wild blooms, weeds, leaves, and woodbines fill the foreground beneath rapidly changing clouds.

Each plane of the landscape has its own character of etched marks, translating the changing light, vegetation, and atmosphere of the moment. As with all of Friese’s prints, Summer’s Close was drawn outdoors, looking outward into the landscape rather than reconstructing it in the studio.

The resulting image is both particular and familiar: an open field, deciduous trees, a country road, distant light, and a sky in motion, a landscape poised between the lingering presence of summer and its inevitable close.

About the artist

Nancy Friese is a painter-printmaker who works in open-air. Friese’s paintings and prints have been exhibited in 30 solo shows and over 200 group shows, nationally and internationally. Friese was elected as a National Academician in the National Academy New York City and received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Friese has an MFA from Yale University School of Art (1980.)

Friese received a BS from University of North Dakota (1970), and studied painting and printmaking at The Art Academy of Cincinnati (1977.) She was granted a Yale University Summer School of Music and Art at Norfolk Fellowship (1976), Wilder Traveling Fellowship (Art Academy of Cincinnati 1977), an Anne Bremer Award (University of California-Berkeley 1978), and the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award (Yale University School of Art 1980), for the achievements in her artistic studies. She received a six- month Lila Acheson Wallace Giverny Fellowship, a Blanche E. Colman Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and a George Sugarman Foundation Grant for painting. Artist’s Resource Trust (ART) funded her exhibition and year-long residency at Trustman Gallery, Boston. She had a Lower Manhattan Cultural Center World Views artist’s studio on the 91st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center until 9/11/2001. Her works are in 50 corporate and museum collections and over 100 private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum UCLA, National Museum of Women in Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Muscarelle Museum, RISD Museum, William Benton Museum of Art, Florence Griswold Museum, CT, New York Public Library, Yale University Art Gallery and more. She was an artist in residence at MacDowell, Millay Arts, Pont-Aven City Hall, Brittany, France and at Andy Warhol’s Montauk Nature Preserve administered by The Nature Conservancy.

Along with being the inaugural resident artist at The Garden Conservancy (2025), Friese has been invited to paint at many distinguished arboretums, national land trusts and gardens including six months in the Gardens of Claude Monet in Giverny, France; at Planting Fields Arboretum, Oyster Bay, Long Island, NY; with the Westerly Land Trust, RI; in the Taft Museum Rose Garden, Cincinnati, OH; and for Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, ND. Friese painted stroll gardens in Tokyo during a six month Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellowship