JACK RASMUSSEN, DIRECTOR AND CURATOR
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, DC
2007
I have taken strenuous hikes up the sides of mountains on the coast of California, and felt my heart beating in my chest from the exertion. As I reached each crest there was always a moment when there was nothing but a great, yawning, heart-stopping space before me. All that physical effort to arrive at a place where I couldn’t belong, between what I knew and the terrifying emptiness of the unknown.
Freya Grand paints this kind of space, where sensuous reality becomes de-materialized through her masterful brushwork, and all that remains are uneasy spirits. Like the great Romantics, Surrealists, and Symbolists before her, she would have us look beyond mere appearance to find invisible, immutable truths inside ourselves.
We know she has stood, balancing, on this ridge. We know she reached farther than she should have done. But as an artist, that is her job.
“Close your bodily eye, in order that you may see your picture first with the eye of your inner spirit. Then bring that which you have seen in darkness into the light of day so that it may react on others from the outside inwards.”
– Caspar David Friedrich