Lucy Fradkin
Lucy Fradkin (born 1953) is an American self-taught artist from New York who paints portraits which often include collage elements. She is inspired by Persian and Indian miniature paintings with bright palettes and flattened space as well as the ancient frescoes and mosaics of Etruria, Rome, and Byzantium. In addition, she visited the Brooklyn Museum as a young artist with her mother and was inspired by The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, as a prominent piece of art by a living woman artist. Biography Early life Lucy Fradkin was born in Brooklyn, New York. She was raised in Port Washington, on Manhasset Bay, on the north shore of Long Island. She spent many formative years in southern Vermont. Since the early 1990s, travels to other cultures have had a profound influence on her studies and artwork. She has found great inspiration from the art of ancient and indigenous cultures of Latin America, Italy and Greece. In 2002-2003, she spent a year living, working, exhibiting and lecturing in Italy. Based in Rome, she was able to travel extensively around the country further informing her work through a visual immersion into the art of ancient worlds. Collections Fradkin's work has been represented within the permanent collection of notable galleries and museums including: "Lucy Fradkin, Home is Where the Heart is" at the Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, 2012. She is included in the Viewing Program Artist Registry at The Drawing Center, New York; and her work "I Wish It Would Rain" was purchased by the Weatherspoon Art Museum, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, for their Dillard Collection of Art on Paper. Her work is in the University Hospitals Art Collection. Fradkin's works "An Awakening To Other Orders of Reality" and "Birds of a Feather" are in the private collection of Agnes Gund, President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and were included in the movie "Aggie". Notable works Notable among Fradkin's works are “Arthur Dreams of India” 2014, and “An Awakening To Other Orders Of Reality”, 2010. Like many of Fradkin's pieces, these paintings feature a full-frontal portrait of either an archetypal or actual individual. The subjects stand in the center of spaces that are described with flattened tiled floors or rugs, and patterned wall papers or curtains. Objects sit, hang and float in these spaces and interact with the figures both abstractly as well as pictorially, resulting in an intimate visual narrative. Fradkin's husband, the Jamaican-born artist Arthur Simms, features in many of Frandin's paintings, most notably “Arthur Dreams of India”. Included in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (United States), this work in acrylic gouache, collage, pencil, and metallic thread on paper, has a flat, folk sensibility. In this portrait, Fradkin has drawn on the traditions of Indian miniature painting to honor Arthur's mother, Icema, who, like others from Jamaica, might have been of Indian descent. “An Awakening To Other Orders of Reality” (acrylic gouache on paper with collage and