At the Scottsdale
Center for the Arts

She uses a lot of paint to create this surface and its mass. She says that when she tries to copy a color she has used before It is not enough to mix the exact color. Her surface and tones seem to need a richness of layers.

In earlier works, especially in the use of oils, Fratt scumbled and allowed the underpaintings to come through more But these newer works, perhaps because they are acrylics, make the underpainting fuse into a single bond. This bond gives an interior light to the color and a sense of the surface as mass. Fratt feels oil is better worked thick to thin and scumbled, but these acrylics have a bright, even clarity that lets the relationships pulse and the large areas spread evenly.

Her use of acrylic pigments which create a somewhat mat brightness indicates a sensibility that prefers fluid paint but applies the new color on a dry color. The sensibility of painting wet into wet, usually done in thickly impastoed oils, say by Philip Guston or de Kooning, is very much an antithesis to Fratt's idea of clear vibrating color. Cezanne had something of this dry placement of color in his later work.

Fratt draws and often makes small compositional sketches for her paintings. She uses collage as a freeing agent that is especially helpful to keep things moving. Collage serves as a way to play with ideas, the colors can be placed and removed at will. Yet her paintings from these collage ideas and sketches have to undergo the changes that scale and medium will dictate. Though her areas are clearly placed, Fratt allows each painting to have its own life of development. Unlike the idea of planning a color layout and then reproducing the well-defined areas that one feels in the work of, say, Frank Stella. Fratt lets the painting create its own form through the dictates of the work in progress.

The show has some stacked canvases which reflect this kind of development. Fratt didn't first decide to do "stacked" panels but the composition of her idea called for this device. When she first used these stacked forms she painted some in different sizes. Some were hung separately which allowed the wall to serve as a flotation area and, as she felt too dependent on the wall for this separate space, the stacked works moved into a format that placed them together. This early idea of the wall functioning as a flotation area may have been incorporated into the expansive inner areas of color that lie beneath the more gestured Iines and small color areas.

Fratt's expressive use of color seems in line with that of Matisse and Rothko. Rothko used color in a dualistic way to deal with "tragedy, ecstasy, doom" and to express pure color harmonies. He said of his paintings, "If you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point." Rothko probably was very sympathetic to the work of Matisse. The use of unifying planes of color to flatten space and the clarity and intuitive expressive color of Matisse is sympathetic to both Rothko and Fratt.

Though Fratt feels that Picasso did not concern himself with color in the way Matisse did, she is very interested in the way Picasso appreciated Matisse's color when he spoke of Matisse's ability to let color breathe: