The line on the wall comes from an opera. The whales came from a bay in Mexico where they calve. Britt Freda put the two together, and Sanctuary is what happened.
Last winter, newly empty-nested, Freda went to a village on the west coast of Mexico — no cars, reachable only by small boat, on a steep bay where humpback whales calve. Her mother has gone there to find sanctuary since Freda was a young child. She stayed eight weeks and painted.
“On the boat ride to the Mexican village where I would paint for 8 weeks, I was dramatically greeted by a breaching humpback whale, and I wept,” she writes. “Whales, to me, are holy: song, story, and power of long lineages of deep matriarchal family bonds.”
She came home to Washington and did something people mostly talk about doing. She sold her house and bought a small one on the water, where she can see orcas and humpbacks, harbour seals, river otters, porpoises, eagles and cormorants. She swims there daily. She paints, in her words, “where I can hear the lap of the Salish Sea from my sanctuary studio.”
The title is a line from Strauss
The work Freda calls thematically central to the collection is a triptych of a humpback whale, and worked into its surface is the score of the Composer’s Aria from Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos — the 1912 opera with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The painting’s title comes from that opera: “The World is Wonderous; those who dare find only beauty here.”
It is worth knowing what the Composer is singing about at that moment. In the aria, he declares
music the holiest of the arts — the one that unites in sacred bonds all who can dare
.
Holiness and daring, in the same breath.
Freda took the daring for her title and, without saying so anywhere, took the holiness for her subject. Whales, to me, are holy. The score is not decoration on that panel. It is the source of the sentence the whole collection is named for.
A note for the pedantic, and we are: English translations of the line differ. The Metropolitan Opera renders the Composer’s exclamation “The world is delightful.” Freda renders it “wondrous.” Both are translations of the same German; she chose the one that suited the painting.
How the paintings are actually made
Stand close to Here, Whales are Gods — thirty by sixty inches, acrylic, gold leaf and graphite on birch panel — and the sea it rises through turns out to be stones. Hundreds of them: rounded cells in slate, bone, ochre and pale green, each outlined and filled by hand. Above the waterline the panel becomes gold leaf, laid in broken sheets, torn at the edges and left unblended. The whale itself is worked in graphite and grey-white acrylic and is the only part of the painting not made of cells. The source photograph is courtesy of Marla Smith Photography.
That cell is the method. In Here, moths seed dreams under a misty moon, four feet square, it goes furthest from any single creature: four moths hang against a pale ground above a meadow assembled entirely from discs, stacked on stems that are themselves narrow bands of grey. From across a room it resolves into weather. Up close it never stops being individual marks.
Read the titles as a set
Nearly every title in the collection opens with the same word. Here, Pelican is an Author and Historian. Here, Frigate is a Pilot. Here, Carpenter Bee is an Architect. Here, A Sea Turtle is My Father. Here, love is everything.
The repetition is doing work. Each one names a place where the ordinary assignment of roles has been redrawn — where a bird keeps the records and a bee draws the plans — and the paintings are the evidence for it. Here is the bay, or the island, or the studio within earshot of the water. It is not a rhetorical flourish. It is an address.
The one you cannot see online
Chocolaté Dulce hangs in the show and is available at $2,900. When Freda sent her
inventory she marked it in progress, image not for publication
. We are honouring that. The
painting is on the wall; the photograph is not on the internet. If you want to see it you will have
to stand in front of it, which is arguably the correct arrangement for a painting.
Alongside: Teresa Smith
Eight of Teresa Smith’s oils hang with them — Along The River, Forest Grove, A Path In, Life At The Pond. They work at walking pace, and their interest is in how light sits on water and how a path proposes a direction without insisting on one. Against Freda’s gold and mosaic they give the room somewhere to rest, which is not a lesser job.
Sanctuary — Britt Freda and Teresa Smith — is on view at 176 Winslow Way E, Bainbridge Island, from 7 August through 3 September 2026. Nineteen works. Every available piece is documented online with its price.
Britt Freda’s words here are quoted from the artist’s statement she supplied with her inventory on 5 August 2026. Details of Ariadne auf Naxos (Richard Strauss, libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, premiered Stuttgart, 25 October 1912) are drawn from the Metropolitan Opera’s educator guide and the published libretto.