Plein air artist to judge art show held during Azalea Festival

Paula Frizbe paints open spaces with heavy brush strokes, filling her paintings with a vast amount of information and imagery that spans a broad perspective.

One of her gifts is massive subtlety, big ideas that aren’t overly obvious. The wide open spaces in her paintings share buildings in the distance or up close, like forced perspective. Sometimes, canvases share irregularly shaped clouds that emit a sense of happiness, or creeks that feel just as open.

The Wilmington Art Association has asked Frizbe, a respected landscape artist, to judge the association’s 38th Juried Spring Art Show and Sale held each year during the Azalea Festival. This year’s event is April 9-11 at St. James Episcopal Church’s Perry Hall at Fourth and Dock streets.

Frizbe is a founding member of The Cumberland Society of Painters, a group of plein air artists from Tennessee. Introduced by a friend to plein air painting, Frizbe has enjoyed and relished the challenge of open spaces.

“I love high angles and low shorelines the best,” Frizbe said. “They make such interesting compositions.”

This will be Frizbe’s first time as a juror, but she brings a love for painting and the experience of having her own work scrutinized. She said she’ll be looking for “good composition and a sense of emotion or mood.”

Some of Frizbe’s work, such as “Cloud Shadows,” is done from a moderately low angle. It recreates the scope, top to bottom, of an open valley with clouds littering a blue sky. Her work, at times, is cinematic. Other times it’s quite literal. One painting that depicts a high locale, “Seville at Daybreak,” begs the question of whether it’s created from a photograph or if Frizbe worked from atop a building.

“That painting is from a photo I took from my hotel room (at) about five in the morning,” Frizbe said. “I did not have paint with me so I had to work from memory and the photo I took.”

What Frizbe sees is often altered in the finished painting. She says that her work is an emotional response to what she witnesses.

“For me, a painting is successful if it conveys mood,” Frizbe said. “An artist is not a photographer. You always have to put something of yourself into the work.”

While Frizbe hopes to travel to the Greek Islands to paint one day, she’ll have the opportunity to take in Wilmington’s geography, be it the country, downtown or the beaches nearby.

“I have heard wonderful things about the Wilmington area from other painters,” she said. “I think it will appeal to me in every area.”

By Brian Tucker
StarNews Correspondent