"Far Out"

Lynda Frese’s search for the sacred in otherworldly collage

by

Visual & Performing Arts

When Lynda Frese talks about her work, she does so with a sense of curiosity—as though she is considering it for the very first time. She stands before a painting, recalling where she was when she made it, some initial intention or idea. When she speaks, she is unafraid of long pauses, of uttering “I think” before an interpretation of what is before her, as though the meaning is never set, never complete. 

Her own work still stops her in her tracks sometimes, she says, referencing Joseph Campbell’s ideal of “aesthetic arrest”—art that holds you in a state of momentary transcendence, whether by its beauty, or by its mystery. And as much as she can glean about herself in these moments—her desires and investigations and states of being—Frese is also excavating revelations of the divine, the sibylline force working within her. 

“It’s very mysterious,” she says. “When you really lock in, you’re tapping into something bigger than you. There are a lot of things that happen to you when you’re making art. You find things out about yourself, what you’re made of. And you don’t have to understand it completely. It’s not a thing you can figure out or take apart and put back together again. It’s a gift.” 

Frese has been a working artist for nearing half a century, her realm a distinctive collision of photography, painting, and printmaking that bears thematic threads, across time, of mysticism, femininity, religion, and nature. Using the art of collage as a mechanism of layered storytelling, her compositions draw together photographs of her own encounters, scraps of imagery she collects like treasure, and otherworldly expressions of color derived from her hand-mixed egg tempera paints. Frese’s approach to the ancient technique is to mix egg yolks (sourced locally, wherever she is working) with earthen pigments—creating a specific “terroir” for each work. 

She began using egg tempera paints a decade ago, in part because of her interest in the work of Italian Renaissance painters. But over time, she’s clung to it—noticing a specific quality it imbues in her collages. “I put different layers down, one after another, and I think what happens is the particles get trapped in these layers, and then the light goes between them, and it feels kind of gemlike—it has this very rich feeling to it, because you’re seeing a color, but you’re also seeing the light beneath the particles.” 

“When you really lock in, you’re tapping into something bigger than you. There are a lot of things that happen to you when you’re making art. You find things out about yourself, what you’re made of. And you don’t have to understand it completely. It’s not a thing you can figure out or take apart and put back together again. It’s a gift.” —Lynda Frese

For the past five years, Frese has been absorbed by interrogations of an extraterrestrial nature, motivated in part by the question: what might the wilderness witness when it is alone? Titling the series, Far Out, she constructs in each piece a natural world that exists outside of time, outside of space. Biomes from across the globe come together in a mythical dimension of particular light and chaos, but crucially—beauty. 

“In them, I’m exploring a world where humans aren’t the center of it all,” she said. “And where plants and animals have a kind of sentience and awareness.” And into these worlds, Frese inserts entities that are mystery at their core, neither of nature nor of man: UFOs.   

Though she didn’t realize it at first, Frese believes now that the project is a continuation of her earlier artistic inquiries of Madonnas and goddesses, Renaissance depictions of apparitions. “I think it’s this ongoing question of searching for . . . what is the sacred?” She went on, “In Renaissance paintings, there are always things coming down, lights, some kind of godly communication coming from another world. What other worlds are out there? What other dimensions?” 

She started by pulling real “unidentified flying objects” straight from the Pentagon reports, and from NASA. When the images were complete, she’d observe them and wonder about these mysterious entities: “How long have they been here?” “Are they here now?” “Did they come long ago and never leave?” Then, she began to create her own celestial objects, exploring the infinite possibilities of what a UFO—this thing that is defined by what we cannot know of it—might actually look like. 

[Read this: "The Pascagoula Abduction: Nearly 50 years after becoming one of the most credible alleged alien abductees in history, Calvin Parker shares his story" ]

“Something about collage is that you can create the narrative by manipulating the size of the imagery,” she said. “There isn’t any reason a UFO can’t be really tiny. It could be underwater. It could be in the sky, or in the ground. It could be, you know, inside of you, I guess.”  

Across her series, Frese’s UFOs take the form of a “traditional” flying saucer, as well as iridescent glimmers pressing from behind the forest’s shadow. In one work, a holographic child’s skull (clipped from a 1985 edition of National Geographic magazine) leads a trail of sequined, jelly-fish-esque baubles through a dense wood. In another, the mystery being manifests as scattered, golden lights over a body of water. 

“Being alone in nature is like being in another dimension. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it happens, there’s something divine.” —Lynda Frese

In, “Jungle Bath,” one of the few artworks from the series that features a human body, it is Frese’s own. She swims, naked, in a pool of water encircled by giant trees wrapped in vines and dripping with thick and indecipherable foliage. “Being alone in nature is like being in another dimension,” she said. “It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it happens, there’s something divine.” 

[Read this: "Jacqueline Bishop's work conveys the creeping dread she feels as the landscapes upon which we depend yield to human pressure."] 

In this work, we see the artist encounter what she imagines the plants do, as she looks up—stunned and alone—at something unexplainable. Here, the UFO is a diamond, floating enormous and still, just feet above the forest floor. It looks incongruous, but at the same time, it kind of doesn’t. You can see the leaves through it, the sun shining upon it. 

How long has it been here? Is it here now? Did it come long ago, and never leave? 

lyndafrese.com