Olivia Fry (b.1992, United States) Olivia Fry is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose figurative works confront themes of loss, vulnerability, and the raw edges of lived experience. Their paintings are charged with intensity, often balancing dark emotional undercurrents with moments of stark tenderness. Fry’s imagery draws from observation and memory, collapsing intimate realities into psychologically dense compositions that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant. Fry’s practice is transatlantic in scope: they exhibited widely across the Pacific Northwest and completed a residency in Brooklyn, New York before relocating to London.

@olivia_fry_art

Process

These shots are across the early weeks that I was working on my piece “Bathers”. It’s a play on the artistic theme of bathers paintings from across art history, with a more contemporary and femme led twist. Dating back as early as the renaissance, paintings of people nude near a body of water has been a recurring theme in art. Usually the figures are situated in nature, near a river. During the Renaissance, artists like Titian and Michelangelo explored this subject. Impressionists like Monet and Cezanne also played off of this subject. My “Bathers” is intended to feel a bit more modern, with the figures in swimwear we associate with the present, and in a setting devoid of water and green space as a nod to climate change. It’s one of my favorite of my newer works.

Influences

I feel very inspired by the works of Jenny Saville (first image), John Singer-Sargent (second image), and Eduard Manet. I like the way they capture human-ness; the raw, the humor, the fleeting moments, the beauty: in a way that really captures the imagination. I also am very inspired by their approach to realism. It feels almost sculptural, where shapes and colors placed next to each other form a recognizable image.

Challenges

I go through seasons where I’m able to make a lot of work, to seasons where I don’t even have a spare moment to pick up a brush. I think sometimes this is just how life is. When I find myself unable to control my “output”, I try to journal and find time to look at the work of other artists. I stay inspired and let ideas sort of build up. In the images shown, I struggled to settle on a face for the central character in “bathers”. I almost gave up. You can see how each rendering changed and evolved into the face that eventually dominates the finished piece.

Reflection

Success to me has changed over time. The art market can be so competitive and chaotic. I now feel that success to me is to continue building on the concepts that I love to explore. To become better at communicating those complex ideas into a striking visual is really where my feelings of accomplishment lie. Sustaining a creative practice is about nurturing yourself. Whether that is physical, emotional, exploratory, it is crucial that you find what you need from life to keep the fire burning. I think it’s okay to go through periods where you are uninspired, or to even lose hope. But you have to keep getting back up. These images are sketches and ideas for new works to come, and I’m feeling myself reignite to see these projects through!