Artist, Sondra Freckelton
Sondra Freckelton, in her studio near Oneonta, NY, April, 2014
Sondra Freckelton was born in Dearborn, Michigan in 1936. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sondra married Jack Beal on September 3, 1955, and the two moved to New York City the following year. Sondra began her art career as a sculptor working in wood and plastic, exhibiting under her married name, Sondra Beal.
Her first show in New York was in 1959 at the Museum of Modern Art in the "Recent Sculpture U.S.A." and her first one-person show was at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1960. Sondra and Jack lived in New York City and worked summers in rural upstate New York on Black Lake near Rossie, NY, from 1967-1974. In 1974 they purchased and renovated an old mill near the town of Oneonta where they established their home and studios and workshops.
During the mid-1970s Sondra began working on large scale watercolor paintings, mostly carefully constructed compositions of forms drawn directly from her gardens and her surrounding environment. In the late 70s and early 80s she exhibited in galleries and traveling shows throughout the country. Brooke Alexander Gallery was one of the early supporters of Sondra's paintings.
She has had solo exhibits at major galleries in New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco. Public collections that have acquired her work include the Art Institute of Chicago; Dennos Museum, Traverse City, Michigan; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Missouri; Madison Art Center, Wisconsin; National Museum of American Art, Washington DC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia; Oklahoma City Museum; and Oglethorpe Museum, Georgia.
Sondra Freckelton's work and teaching philosophy are the subjects of the Watson/Guptill publication entitled Dynamic Still Life's in Watercolor by M. Stephen Doherty. Some other publications that include her work are Contemporary American Realist Drawings, Hudson Hill Press, 1999; American Watercolor, by Chris Finch, Abbeville Press, 1986; and The Art of Watercolor, by Charles LeClair, Watson/Guptill, New York, 1994.
In 1974 Sondra and Jack bought a former mill on the Ouleout Creek, They totally renovated the structure and with Sondra's designs and models they built their home and studios there.
Sondra's husband, Jack Beal, passed away on August 29, 2013. Sondra Freckelton lives and works in the renovated mill she designed, on the Delhi Stage Road, near Oneonta, New York.