I arrive outside the Pajama Factory, 1307 Park Ave., a bit before 10 a.m., which is when I am set to meet Alida Frey, a local artist. I see her through my rearview window, but she is gone like smoke before I can gather my things and shuffle out of my car.
So I spend some time with the courtyard, where there is a cement micro creek, a half dozen sculptures (presumably by Pajama Factory artists) and a lot of dead greens. There is an abandoned carnival feeling to the place, amidst a kind-of creative ticking.
Signs are hung on the brick walls that surround the courtyard; various spaces have external decorations and friendly, cheerful folks pass by and say hello.
I spend some time with the delightfully creepy courtyard and then search for the studios. Frey emerges and leads me inside to her studio. The hallway is a darkish green, and the doors to other artists' spaces are painted with chalkboard paint. The artists renting them have decorated them or hung an artist's statement, their business cards and newspaper clippings.
Her studio is much tinier than I expect, but is unmistakably an artist's haven.
I ask her about the size and she replies, "When I was in-residence here, I had a much bigger space, but it's nice to be able to maintain a separate space from where I live that's just for work."
She cleans at the factory in exchange for the space, but is happy to do so with the group of folks who are working together to keep up the massive space that is still half empty.
There are shelves in one corner of her studio with paints, brushes and sketches. In another corner, there's an overstuffed davenport that is where her dogs, Gypsy and Eloise, hang out for the duration of our visit (Gypsy is a Great Dane, Eloise is a Great Dane-English Mastiff mix).
Drawings and paintings hang on the walls and the space matches the artist: even though her residence is technically over, she obviously dwells at peace in the Pajama Factory.
Frey is a slender woman with beautiful, long, black dreadlocks and bright, alert, brown eyes. She grew up in Virginia, in Fairfax County.
She says, "I started painting in watercolor. I started taking lessons when I was in elementary school. I think that has definitely influenced the way I paint with oils now."
The way she paints is smooth. She uses oils like wash (a technique used with watercolor), most of her brush strokes are invisible. Perhaps her treatment of the medium is what makes her work so arresting, so vibrant.
She attended public school, and always knew she wanted to be an artist. She first became aware of fine art looking through a Neimann Marcus Magazine at the photographs of couture, from where she collected images of nearly naked fashion models that she now views as part of her visual vocabulary.
She says, "I always knew I wanted to portray this sexual image - something that's playful but erotic at the same time."
She is successful in this mission. Her current body of work includes paintings of nude women and dogs (she has retired the watermelon as a secondary subject). And while the women often are posed together, there is not the homoerotic element I would have logically expected. Her work is puzzling in that way; she celebrates mystery, vulnerability and the power of both sensuality and the matriarch in her work.
She credits part of developing this balance to her recent experience of becoming Eloise's nursemaid. Eloise had a litter of thirteen puppies and Frey spent several months helping her and considering the wolf-pack mentality. She and Eloise have kept one of the puppies.
I ask her what her favorite painting is and she says that her favorite shifts, but that her most memorable was a sort of breakthrough piece for her. It's called "Lunch," and she shows me a print of it on her iPad. Its composition is triangular, the shadows are dusky and the colors she uses give the piece a surrealistic element.
When I ask her why she decided to stay in Williamsport instead of going back to Brooklyn, which is - at least in the imaginations of wannabes - a much better place to be an artist, she gets animated.
She says, "The Pajama Factory provides this awesome community of artists that you lose right after you graduate. All of the sudden you're not handed this great community that cares about what you're doing, so I feel really at home, and I didn't want to leave, so I decided to stay. Also, it's super-affordable, so it's easy for me to just kind of lay low and spend a lot of time painting."
I ask her if she is able to sustain herself with her art alone here and the answer seems to be, "Mostly, yeah!" She admits that she has a gig with a production company in New York that she can pick up when she needs to, but for the most part, she couldn't keep her present lifestyle on such a small, extra-artistic amount of work as she does in Williamsport.
In her artist statement, Frey mentions an all-girls' summer camp in the Adirondacks, where she spent summer weeks during childhood. It was there that she first "developed an overwhelming curiosity for the magic of the woods and the liberated female."
I ask her about the camp and she describes it as a typical summer camp situation with girls on one side of a river, boys on the other, and she speaks with the fondness of nostalgia about camaraderie with other girls and the strong women counselors and being free and wild in the woods. Her work really captures the wild caprice that she describes in her recollection.
Her work will be on display through April 10 at 33 East, 33 E. Third St. Visit alidafrey.com to see more of Frey's work.
