‘A Day in the Wilderness’ by Holly Friesen (Image provided)

LAKE PLACID — The Lake Placid Center for the Arts will host a gallery reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, June 23 to celebrate the opening of “Breathing the Forest”.

This new exhibit, featuring new paintings of Canadian landscape artist Holly Friesen will be on display in the gallery at LPCA through July 30. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission is free.

Friesen’s paintings seek to redefine the genre of landscape painting through an intense searching of the “wilderness soul”. As the artist Jake Berthot once said, “I don’t want to depict nature, I want to paint nature’s phenomena.” As a forest lover and a river follower Friesen’s paintings are infused with these experiences and this untamed energy breathes its own living essence onto the canvas through the artist’s use of texture, movement and exuberant color.

At 5 p.m. Wednesday, July 19, there will be a live painting collaboration with spoken word poet and musician, Moe Clark, titled “Wild Listening”.

There will be a closing brunch at 10 a.m. Sunday, July 30.

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About the artist

Friesen was born in Saskatchewan, studied visual arts at John Abbott College in Montreal and painting at York University in Toronto. After many years of travel and study she settled in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec and opened ArtBeat Studio where she painted and taught for 15 years. Four summer seasons saw Friesen as artistic director and curator of The Art Barn in Mont-Tremblant. In 2010 she was curator and project manager of Ateliers du Village, an artist run gallery in Mont-Tremblant village. She currently works as the Montreal curator for the daily online art auction ArtBomb, which features Canadian artists and their artwork. The artist’s studio is based out of Montreal, Quebec where she also works as artistic director and curator of E.K. Voland Art Gallery. Her paintings are collected internationally and part of both corporate and private collections. Friesen’s passion is painting vibrant landscapes from the inside out while collaborating with other artists to make art more visible in our everyday world.

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Artist statement

“My work revolves around earth-honoring images that reflect and instill connection to local bio-regions. These images internalize a reverence for the earth and shift the intent from harming the world to living in a mutually life enhancing manner. I learn what I need to know by painting. The more I paint the less separation there is between inner and outer worlds. For me, painting is like deep prayer awakening an inner wilderness that reflects the earth’s landscape; the image is in you and you are in the image. Painting is my breath, beauty my compass and the earth is my body.”