Sondra Freckelton: Biographical Sketch

Sondra Freckelton was born in Dearborn, Michigan in 1936 and studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. She began her career as a sculptor working in wood and plastic, exhibiting under her married name, Sondra Beal. She debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in the "Recent Sculpture U.S.A." show in 1959 and achieved her first one-man show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1960.

During the mid-1970s Ms. Freckelton was one of several noted abstract artist who turned to realism in their work. She began working in transparent watercolor -a logical extension of the delicate watercolor studies she had done for her transparent vacuum-formed sculptures. She had her first solo show of large-scale color saturated watercolors with the Brooke Alexander Gallery in 1976. Numerous museums, galleries and traveling shows throughout the United States have exhibited her watercolors. She has had solo exhibits at major galleries in New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco. (Some of the public collections that include her work are the Art Institute of Chicago; Dennos Museum Missouri; 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.)

Ms. Freckelton's work and teaching philosophy on 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. Sondra Freckelton and her husband, artist Jack Beal, live and work near Oneonta, New York.