From Cotopaxi to the Scottish Highlands, this Washington, D.C., oil painter captures nature at its most elemental, immersing herself in landscapes that are vast, wild, and unpredictable.
By Hilary Pierce
Making art is an exhilarating journey, calling for decision after decision until the final image takes form. But when that journey unfolds in the open air, absorbed in nature, things can get wild.
Working outdoors demands more than technique, however. It requires curiosity, courage, and a willingness to step into the unexpected. Under these conditions, plein air painters create art in ways that aren’t always predictable or comfortable. Such is the case with Freya Grand, who has devoted her life’s work to capturing remote landscapes and the raw forces of the natural world.
That same impulse to explore guided 19th-century Hudson River School painter Frederic Church, who, under the tutelage of his mentor Thomas Cole, honed both his craft and his reverence for nature. Venturing beyond familiar terrain, he traveled by steamship and train to the Arctic regions of Labrador, Newfoundland, and to the Andes in Ecuador, where he painted the active volcanoes Cotopaxi and Chimborazo.
Fast-forward more than 150 years. Grand returned to the very place in Ecuador that Church explored, staying in the same hacienda overlooking Cotopaxi. But instead of setting up her easel on the tiled patio to paint the scene from a comfortable distance, she hiked up close, and even flew by helicopter to observe its crater firsthand.
As the volcano belched sulfurous fumes that obscured and then revealed glowing cadmium orange lines of active lava flow, Grand’s well-trained eye spotted the subject of her next painting. Based on digital photographs she took from the air and her examination of the dynamic shapes and forms of the massive earthen structure that has moved and shifted for hundreds of thousands of years, the work is at once awe-inspiring, dizzying, and evocative.
Whether they capture grand vistas or more intimate views of the landscape, Grand’s paintings all emerge from a similar kind of layered observation — journals named for each place she visits, pencil drawings and watercolor sketches made on site, and memories — anchoring her work in lived experience.
Read the full article in PleinAir Magazine, October/November 2025
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Blog post prepared for the web by Cherie Dawn Haas, Editor of Plein Air Today
