Busy Hill en Montecito Heights is presented as part of the Natural Rituals exhibit at Lansing Street Gallery in April and May of 2025. This piece is a 16 x 14 inch watercolor on paper, framed.

Meredith Frederick is an artist, educator, and curator based on the Northern California coast. She is the owner and curator of TC SPACE, an independent gallery in downtown Fort Bragg. Her work as an educator spans over the last fifteen years, including independent fine art workshops and positions at High Tech High in San Diego (2009-2020), Mendocino High School (2020-2023), and Fort Bragg Middle School (2024-present). Frederick is the recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities scholarship to attend the Authors in the Prado Summer Scholar Program in Madrid—an experience that deepened her commitment to painting. This led to an artist residency in Kandolhu, Maldives, where she created site-specific works, engaged in cross-disciplinary collaboration, and began weaving themes of nature and place more deeply into her painting practice.

Artist Statement: "My paintings are rooted in autobiographical environments and the unexpected moments I observe in nature. These encounters are gradually distilled into specific forms, textures, and colors—shaped by my evolving relationship with each place over time. Rendered in expressive layers of color and gesture, these elements form the foundation of a narrative that becomes increasingly obscured as the painting unfolds. Fantasy often enters into the composition, blurring the line between external reality and internal experience.

I use heightened color palettes and fragmented spatial relationships to amplify the emotional undercurrents within the work. As each layer accumulates, the painted marks both reveal and conceal: adding complexity to the story while veiling the details that came before. Figures and impressions from various times and places overlap, allowing memory, observation, and imagination to coexist on the same surface. The process of painting becomes an act of remembering and rewriting."