See-saw, 1960

Red Mesa, 1977

The 1970s brought Fratt more time to focus on her artwork after marrying Curtis Calivin Cooper Jr. (1914–2008), known by friends as Bud. Cooper was an aspiring artist and a banker who oversaw his family’s cattle ranch, Cooper Mountain Ranch in Williams, Arizona. Fratt would work from the ranch during the summer months and return to their home on Camelback Mountain during the cooler months. The Camelback Mountain residence had expansive windows that looked out over the city and surrounding desert landscape with ample space for Fratt to have a formal artist studio. In 1973, the Scottsdale Fine Arts Commission solicited numerous art supporters to help purchase a painting by Fratt for their collection, which would later transition to Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art Collection. The commission members succeeded in 1983 with the purchase of Red Mesa (1977), although they previously acquired the print Jacob’s Ladder Festival VIII by commissioning the artist through their annual arts festival in 1976. During this decade, the artist set aside teaching and commissions to focus on expanding her artistic expression, resulting in three decades of prolific output.

Summer Red, 1973

The Night Between, 1980

Fratt experimented with conjoined canvas paintings that she called “dialogues” or “counter dialogues” to form relationships between each part of a whole painting. Using two or three canvases of different sizes to test the boundaries of the overall shape, Fratt no longer saw separate frames to work in but an expanded space in which she created meaning through color and form. In single canvas works, Fratt explored her dialogues by dividing the canvas into two colors, typically different shades of the same hue, as seen in The Night Between (1980). Fratt’s dialogue paintings are visual conversations that create dynamic viewing experiences as one’s eyes bounce back and forth across the canvas.

Great Day, 1982

A true colorist, Fratt combined pigment with an acrylic base to form a wide palette of varying reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, violets, and blacks. Using pigments, including cadmium red, ultramarine blue, thalo green, hansa yellow-orange, and yellow ochre, the artist always mixed and remixed to find the exact hue she envisioned. Fratt expressed that the phenomenal light in the desert inspired her various color combinations that seem to represent an attitude over reality. John Armstrong, who organized Fratt’s 1980 exhibition at Scottsdale Center for the Arts and collaborated with her on several serigraphs in the 1980s and 1990s, recalls that halfway through the run of Great Day (1981), the orange ink for the band across the top ran out. He was concerned about color matching, but Fratt calmly began to mix a new batch and shortly returned with more ink of the exact same orange that only a true colorist could achieve.

Conjecture, 1987

Through abstraction, Fratt was free to experiment with the representation of reality by diminishing a painting’s focal point to achieve atmospheric levity of place and self. The artist referred to many of her works as “floating paintings,” underscoring her interest in suspending gravity. In Conjecture (1987) and Dilemma (1988), Fratt signed the paintings on all edges, allowing for variable viewing orientations. In several paintings, such as Red Ahead (1983), Fratt amplified the base color with forms in similar hues to create “phantoms.” Aiming to register the optic effects of the atmosphere on a painting, the artist worked with red on red, blue on blue, yellow on yellow, and black on black, to name a few, but in almost indistinguishable shades. One’s perception of Fratt’s phantom paintings shifts depending on the light, distance, and angle in which it is viewed, sometimes only registering the forms on the periphery.

Dilemma, 1988

Crescendo, 1993

Fratt intentionally chose open-ended titles to allow for individual interpretation, yet they offer insight into the artist’s life experiences and interests. The pleasure of movement and interaction with others is conveyed through Fratt’s use of color and formal gestures, as well as her titles that refer to games, dance, and music, such as 6 Sticks (1989) and Crescendo (1993). Select titles acted as homages to artists whose works and styles inspired her, including El Circo (1988) after Alexander Calder’s Cirque Calder [Calder’s Circus]. Fratt was interested in the Japanese aesthetic of Shibui and the Buddhist philosophy of Zen, which she explored in paintings like Red Mantra (1986) and Shi Bui (1983). While many titles refer to identifiable things, several of them are symbolic of temporal moments or internal thoughts, such as a statement of surprise in Oh My (2000) or a difficult situation in Dilemma (1988). In total, Fratt’s titles act as symbolic gestures that guide viewers toward a multiplicity of perspectives.