San Antonio-based artist, Cassidy Fritts, is the featured artist at Provenance Gallery in July. In her work, Fritts explores the connection between emotions and human experience through portraiture. Each piece focuses on an individual’s contemplative, yet seemingly apathetic facial expressions to symbolize those moments and feelings in our lives that we usually take for granted, but that are an important aspect of the human experience. She is interested in the idea that individuals tend to reflect on their lives and punctuate their experience in extremes; thinking of the extremely happy, the extremely sad, the extremely terrible, and often ignoring or forgetting the all of the moments in between.
Read on to learn more about her work and influences and click through the slide show above for more images.
What are some of the influences on your work & artistic practice?
One of the biggest influences on my work, as it is for many artists, is my personal experience. I grew up in a home with lots of conflict and my family, and my immediate and intermediate family often felt disconnected from one another. Thus, while growing up and even currently, I feel very disconnected to those I’m related to and detached from people in general. However, art has been the primary practice that I’ve been able to use to reconnect with my family and connect with others. Obviously a huge influence on my work is the people in my life. All of the portraits I create reference people I know and creating their portraits allows me to strengthen my connection with those people.
What drives you as an artist? What are you passionate about that you're able to express through your art?
I very much feel like a majority of people are brainwashed into a certain way of living; many of us enter a cliched lifestyle established by others and many of us are convinced that it’s inappropriate to just be who we are, even though we verbally encourage that. I use my art as a way to not only express how I feel or strengthen connections with the people I paint, draw, or photograph, but I also use my art to show people a way of existing and accepting the fact that the human experience does not have to be a cliche cycle, but one can acknowledge who they are, all the good and all the bad and all of what happens in between, and it is acceptable to just exist that way. I feel very strongly about the idea of confronting one’s experience and understanding that every moment we experience is essential to what it means to be human.
Tell me about any current or upcoming projects.
Although the work in my upcoming show at Provenance Gallery is primarily watercolor work, I feel the need to return to oil paints. While working on the pieces for this upcoming show, I was able to reflect a lot on my past, talk to friends and family about their pasts, and I was inspired to explore the idea of mental and physical abuse and how it is viewed by the survivors and how it feels to live with those memories. These pieces will be a little larger and feature realistic portraits of those that are willing to share their experiences and be a part of a series that brings awareness to these issues. I plan to make these pieces mixed media as well in order to visually convey the feelings that the survivors have towards their memories of their experiences.
Where you do find inspiration?
A lot of my inspiration comes from just looking at and speaking to people I know. As I’ve said before, I use my artwork to usually strengthen my connections with people or reconnect with people. I like to use the portraits I paint to express how I think people are more than just what they physically appear to be. If I choose to paint you, it typically means that you’ve made a deep impact in my life and that I feel very strongly about who you are and your position in my life. Other inspiration comes from stories of creation and things I read about the psychology and philosophies about art and human existence.
Which artists do you admire most, and why?
An artist I’ve admired for a very long time is Jenny Morgan. Her paintings and concepts are very inspiring and influential. I love the way she manipulates the physical appearance of her mediums and her use of color in her work. I also really admire how you can tell she treats her work and the subjects of her work very intimately. Another artist I admire intensely is James Borders. He is mainly a sculptor, but talented in pretty much every artistic field. The formal qualities of his work are extremely inspiring and awesome and he is the artist that has taught me about the most important aspect of being an artist: sensitivity. He was actually a professor of mine and continues to be a mentor and friend to me. I dedicate a lot of my successes in my art career to him.
Cassidy Fritts is a painter and mixed media artist residing and working in San Antonio, TX. Fritts was born in Montgomery, AL in 1994 and also spent most of her teenage life in Bavaria, Germany. Fritts graduated from the University of the Incarnate Word in May 2017 with a BFA, concentrating in painting. Her artwork focuses primarily on different aspects of identity: how it is viewed, manipulated, and misconstrued by individuals. Her paintings and mixed media work mainly feature faces as subject matter as she believes that the face and its physical attributes are the primary indicator and tool used to characterize one’s identity. Fritts has exhibited work in Texas in juried and non-juried shows and has participated in public art events like the Kerrville Chalk Festival. She has been featured as the cover story for the magazine StudyBreaks and has been published in annual art and literary journals including Quirk and Illuminations. In addition to being a working artist, Fritts is also currently a teaching artist at a nationally and internationally recognized arts non-profit organization, SAY SÃ. She is a visual arts instructor at this organization where she provides art education to middle school and high school students in San Antonio.
You can see more of her work by following her on instagram @cassidy.fritts.​