Britt
Freda

Britt Freda received a double degree with honors in fine art and writing from St. Lawrence University in New York. She studied painting, drawing, and photography at the Lorenzo de' Medici Institute of Art in Florence, and by invitation completed an intensive residency at La Cipressaia in Montagnana, Italy — not Montepulciano, as is sometimes noted — under South African artists Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky. The European training is present in her work: the formal relationship between figure and ground, the drawing discipline beneath the painted surface, the gold leaf — all carry the weight of a practice formed in dialogue with centuries of Western image-making. She lives on a small farm on an island in Puget Sound.

In Untitled, four shorebirds rendered in meticulous detail occupy the shallow foreground of this composition, their plumage articulated in burnt sienna, ochre, and cream against a beach of pale sand and graphite-gray water that recedes with deliberate flatness toward a milky horizon. The artist's brushwork vacillates between tight representational precision in the birds' intricate feather patterns and loose, gestural swirls in the wet sand below, creating a productive visual tension between control and spontaneity. The low vantage point and shallow spatial recession suggest observation from water level itself, yet the ornithological specificity—likely sandpipers or plovers—undercuts any romantic communion with nature, instead presenting these creatures as specimens worthy of scientific regard. Since 2011 her work has focused on endangered species. Each piece is built on archival paper, panel, or linen — watercolor, acrylic, graphite, and gold leaf applied in layers, the surface embedded with etched words, population statistics, poems, maps, and seedpods. The embedded material is not ornament: it is evidence. Her work was included in the Environmental Impact U.S. museum tour (2013–2015) and is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, where the same work received both the Trustee's Purchase Award and the People's Choice Award — the first time in the exhibition's history any work had won both. She returned to the National Museum's Western Visions show in 2024 and serves as Creative Director of Northwest Artists Against Extinction, a project of Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition. Her work has appeared in Southwest Art Magazine, American Art Collector, and American Artist Watercolor Magazine; she is represented by RARE Gallery in Jackson Hole in addition to JG Art Gallery.

At JG, six works span from small intimate pieces at to the commanding The Kiss (Geoduck Shells) at — a large-format work that demonstrates the full complexity of her layered surface. The gold leaf catches light differently than the watercolor beside it. The etched text is visible at close range. The whole composition requires time to absorb. These are not decorative works. They are arguments, made in the most patient and considered medium available.

Gold leaf in painting is not decoration in the sense of being ornamental without function. It changes the light relationship of everything around it. It makes demands on what it touches.