Sarajo Frieden: The Color of Invention
A Color Expert
Frieden calls her own work “simple, but layered — my images are dense. But I’m not interested in bells and whistles. It’s a flat, silkscreen sort of look, very hand drawn.” She’s also big on curves. Notes the artist, “That was my rebellion, wanting to shift away from straight angles.”
It is for her expert use of color, however, that Frieden is best known. “I don’t use rules of color,” she says. “For me, color is intuitive. It’s also interesting to limit your use of color; for instance, to see how far you can push a single color-family relationship. You can communicate a lot with just one color, by finding all the possibilities that exist within that range.”
“And as soon as I hear, ‘Your work is so — anything,’ I want to change it,” says Frieden.
Fresh off a green phase, Frieden is now captivated by shades in the rust family — hues like sepia, gold, yellow ochre, raw sienna, and Chinese orange. “It’s fun to see how many different combinations, in one color family, you can come up with,” she says. “Your colors are a great part of your toolset, because color has a very strong emotional underpinning — it communicates feeling.”
Under Construction
Anticipating new visitors to her website, Frieden cautions that it’s currently under construction. “Actually,” she says, “that’s a good metaphor for my work and my life — I’m always under construction! But I’m torn,” she continues. “I do want to have the website, but I don’t want to be defined by it. I tend to be fluid with my life and my career — it’s my nature.”
That nature keeps Frieden on a restless quest. “I’m very hard on my own work,” she confesses. “When I walk into a room and see a piece I made some time ago, I hate it — I want to destroy it. And that’s what’s hard about having a website. I wonder, Why do I even want to show people what I did two years ago?” Of course, adds the artist, “I realize that’s not a very sensible, put-money-in-the-bank attitude. You can’t only show the work you did this week.”
But you get the sense she’d like to, just to stay sharp and growing. “I’m always trying to trip myself up,” is the way Frieden puts it. “It’s not interesting to me to do something if I know what it’s going to be. The image I get won’t be interesting.”
She makes art, she says, “for the thrill of the ride. I can’t imagine not doing it. And if I had no tools at all, I’d do it in my mind. It’s part of what makes me feel alive and human.” Frieden feels her mandate as an artist is to interpret the world. “It’s not necessarily about beauty,” she says. “That’s such a subjective term. My work may be funny or serious. And if it’s color or beauty that draw people in, then maybe after they stop to really look, they’ll realize there’s more than that going on.”
