Peter N. Fritsch
THE WEBSITE OF COPAKE,NY ARTIST, PETER N. FRITSCH
               (A.K.A. 'NICK FRITSCH')                         

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

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Peter Nicholas (Nick) Fritsch was born in New York City in 1954. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1979, where he studied painting with Herb Katzman, Sylvia Mangold, Don Eddy, and Gilbert Stone, and life drawing with John Button.

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After graduating, Fritsch became involved in video production and post-production. In 1988, he took over Lyrichord Discs, the independent world and classical music label founded by his father in 1950. During his years at Lyrichord, in addition to his production work, he designed graphics and created photography for more than 150 CD releases, as well as advertisements, catalogs, and brochures—often incorporating illustrations by his wife, artist and historian Lesley Doyel.

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In 2014, Fritsch returned to painting and began studying figure drawing with Robert Cenedella at the Art Students League. He now works in his studio in Copake, New York, employing an acrylic underpainting and glazing technique favored by his former SVA teacher, the late illustrator Gilbert Stone.

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A formative influence on Fritsch’s work came in the mid-1980s, when he and his wife encountered the paintings of mid-20th-century New York and Woodstock artist George Copeland Ault (1891 - 1948).  The experience proved pivotal in shaping his artistic focus.

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“Here was a representational artist who could simultaneously distill and convey his personal communion with the external world, while also evoking a deep—almost mystical—sense of isolation from it. The simplest barn, tree, brook, or floodlight is reduced to its most elemental formal truth, seen through a lens of near-sacred solitude, inevitably linked to mortality and existence itself. I never forgot it.”

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Fritsch is drawn to the vernacular visual language established by many American artists working between the World Wars—among them George Ault, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Burchfield—and is gratified to see this language continued in the work of contemporary representational painters.

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“I don’t see this as a derivative or nostalgic return to earlier styles,” he notes. “Rather, it feels like a continuation of visual dialects that emerge from a shared experience—something woven into our collective American DNA.”

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Fritsch lives with his wife  Lesley Doyed in New York City but spends much of his time upstate. He, Lesley, and their dog Opal still take great pleasure in nighttime walks through the small Hudson Valley town of Copake.

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