The act of standing alone in the silence of a remote place – both as a human being and as a painter – is essential.
Compelled by both urgency and curiosity, I seek these wild and uninhabited places in order to immerse myself in the rhythms and the formations of the earth. I want to investigate both the close view of tangled roots and stones, and the high overlook of vast expanses. These places offer a potent source of meaning and an opening, a glimpse into the vastness of the forces that govern our earth.
My large oil paintings of sea and rocks, dense forests, openings in the earth, are not so much portraits of particular places as they are immersions in the emotional experience of being there. The sweep of shapes from disparate parts of the world all reflect the natural forces that are at work everywhere. They remind us of our deeply imbedded connection to our earth and to the truth that nature operates according to its own physical laws.
My paintings have a strong sense of place and yet they are not realistic.  Although descriptive, they do not reproduce the visual record so much as the experiential one.  They inhabit a territory that lies between abstraction and realism.
We all carry our own inner immensity.  The landscape makes possible thoughts that we cannot and do not have anywhere else.
-Freya Grand
