Sarajo Frieden: The Color of Invention
Sarajo Frieden never stops exploring. She’s loath to be labeled or stuck with a style. “People will say, ‘Your work is so whimsical,’” she says with a sigh. “But I don’t intentionally go into a project with the idea that it’s going to be whimsical. And as soon as I hear, ‘Your work is so — anything,’ I want to change it. I always want to be playing and pushing toward something new.”
Frieden is an artist and illustrator admired for her strong sense of design, sure use of color, and the textured, hand-drawn look of her work. Her commissioned works — for clients like American Express, Condé Nast Traveler, and Old Navy — show up in feature film titles, TV commercials, type fonts, magazines, cookbooks, and children’s books, and on CD packaging, UNICEF greeting cards, chocolate boxes, and even a line of alien space girl wallpaper. On her own time Frieden ventures beyond the innate considerations of products and clients; her personal paintings and collages tell rich visual stories and draw on sources as diverse as Hungarian folk art and Persian miniatures. “I’m a scavenger of cultures and images,” she says with a laugh.
“I’m a scavenger of cultures and images,” says Frieden.
Everyday Frieden relies on her Power Mac G5, Photoshop, and Illustrator, and yet she manages to generate art that doesn’t look, well, computer-generated. “Especially in the early years computer illustration was thought to be cold,” she recalls. “You could look at a piece, recognize the artist’s style, and know how they did it.” Instead, she continues, “I try to use my Mac tools to stand on my head. They help me see the world differently, to not be bogged down with preconceived ideas.”
Cross-Pollinating Media
Frieden keeps it fresh by eschewing straight edges and overused effects like filters and gradated shadows. Her work displays a lively authenticity that springs from the way she combines handmade elements and digitized images. She works in pencil, gouache, acrylic, and collage. She scans these media into Photoshop and Illustrator and layers them with digital files of past pieces. “I’ll take imagery from those files and play with it compositionally in the software,” she explains. “Or I cut and paste and combine it to brainstorm a fresh way of looking at the work. Then I might use it as a jumping-off point for the next place I go.
“There are so many permutations of what you can do now, I can’t even keep track of them all. On the Mac it’s so easy to exchange material from one application to another, according to which program does each operation best.”
Continues Frieden, “The Mac is so fast and fluid, it gives artists the ability to work in real time, with large files, at a resolution that works beautifully for high-quality print output. It’s that great fluidity that makes it possible for me to always be expanding what I do.” Combining traditional media like paint on paper with images from the digital world is especially valuable to Frieden because, she says, “it’s what happens when you cross-pollinate that interests me. And the Mac has that ability to bring all the different elements together and compose them digitally so you get a new result.”
Feeding the Monster
In her pursuit of new images, Frieden devours visual impressions with a hearty and eclectic appetite. “I first got interested in design when I saw what was coming out of Japan, where everything is art,” she says. “Then there’s the Eastern European influence of my grandparents. And I’ve always felt drawn to works by anonymous people — the so-called outsider artists.”
Her bookshelves contain a trove of visual references, from Indian miniatures and the art of the Mughal court to Islamic calligraphy, Japanese woodblock prints, Shaker trance drawings, and Hungarian embroidery. These and other artistic traditions inform Frieden’s insights.
“In our visually saturated world, we’re all exposed to so many images,” she observes. “On the Internet you can see the work of a 21-year-old who just graduated from art school in China and it can have an impact on you. Things get picked up and adopted from one medium to another. And there’s a need to keep feeding that image-creation monster.”
