Betsy Eby | Chromatic Frequencies, Opening Reception

As both a painter and musician, Eby brings a rare sensitivity to her practice, drawing on her heightened perceptual gifts, creating correspondences between color, rhythms and sound. 

Chromatic Frequencies emerges from Eby’s recent personal journey. Following major neurosurgery, she turned to Solfeggio Frequencies, soundscapes rooted in hertz frequencies known by researchers to have healing properties on the brain and body’s neural networks. An evolution of her lifelong practice of painting nature based abstractions, this body of work explores themes on a quantum level at once read micro and macroscopically, bringing together Eby’s love of music, colorfield painting, rhythmic line and materiality.  She builds resonant color fields representing harmonic systems then disrupts those systems with the embodiment of gestural line work. The lines bury, recede and emerge, hovering amidst luminous fields. One painting to the next explores analogous or contrasting color worlds, decisions affecting their resulting moods. 

Eby speaks of the Japanese process, Kintsugi, or “golden repair,” a tradition in which broken vessels are mended with precious metals, celebrating scars as markers of resilience. “The act of painting is a recognition of the beauty found through survival, with each painting being a record of systems disrupted then renewed,” Eby states.  Chromatic Frequencies reflects Eby’s belief in the healing power of sound translated into material form.     

Betsy Eby earned her BA in Art History at the University of Oregon in 1990 and has since exhibited her artworks widely, showing across the United States and Europe. Her works are held in numerous public and private collections including the Tacoma Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum of Art. She and her husband, painter Bo Bartlett, split their time between studios in Columbus, Georgia, and Wheaton Island, Maine. A native to Oregon, Eby cites her early influences in the Northwest mystics, Pacific Northwest modernism and atmospheric abstraction.