Sondra Freckelton
Sondra Freckelton (1936 - 2019) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began her career as a sculptor working in wood and plastics. She debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in the Recent Sculpture U.S.A. show in 1959 and achieved her first one-man show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1960.
Freckelton was one of several noted abstract artists who turned to realism in the mid-1970's. She began working in transparent watercolor – an extension of the delicate watercolor studies she did for her transparent vacuum-formed sculptures. Her first solo show of large-scale color saturated watercolors was with the Brooke Alexander Gallery in 1976. Numerous museums, galleries and traveling shows throughout the United States have exhibited her watercolors. She had solo exhibits at major galleries in New York, Chicago, Washington, D. C., and San Francisco. Some of the public collections that include her work are the Art Institute of Chicago; Dennos Museum, MI; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI; Madison Art Center, WI; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VA; Oklahoma City Museum; and Oglethorpe Museum, GA.
Freckelton’s work depicted flowers, vegetables, and handmade objects associated with everyday activities—quilts, garden implements, household objects that “are the quiet work of housewives and artisans,” she said. Her subjects spoke “about life—about how we slept, ate and dreamed and lived.” Freckelton’s paintings were included in major solo and group exhibitions with other artists who elevated watercolor painting in general and still-life painting in particular. Her paintings and approach to watercolor were described in the book Dynamic Still Lifes in Watercolor. Sondra Freckelton’s Approach to Color, Composition and Control of the Medium (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1983).
For six decades Freckelton created lithographs, pochoir, and screen prints with various master printers. She worked near Oneonta, New York at the home and studio she and her late husband, Jack Beal, built along the Ouleout Creek. Learn more at: The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
