Nancy Friese is a painter and printmaker who studied at the Yale University School of Art, the graduate painting program at the University of California, Berkeley and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She divides her time between Rhode Island and North Dakota and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

Her landscape paintings have a bright, almost effervescent feeling of splashes of color, with radiant high-chroma passages contrasted with more subtle hues.

At times her oil paintings have a bit of a feeling of gouache, in areas of color that are perceived as shapes, rather than blended passages or impressionistic dabs.

Her skies are frequently filled with roiling cumulous clouds, glowing with violets and reds. There is often a feeling of motion in her canvasses, not in the sense of depicting objects in motion, but a feeling that the colors themselves are in motion.

The color feels like it is straining against its bounds, as if trying to burst from the canvas, but is securely held in place by her firmly balanced compositions.

One might think from looking at her work that they are studio paintings, but my understanding is that most, if not all, of her canvasses are painted on location; and many of them are large scale.

Her web site has a gallery of oils, as well as a selection of prints and watercolors.

There is a good article about the artist on Painting Perceptions, which is where I encountered her work.