Jarvis Cocker has got his radio show, Damon Albarn has his Chinese operas and Liam Gallagher has his clothing label, but Justine Frischmann has kept a low public profile – until now. On a Thursday afternoon in New York art week, the former frontwoman of Elastica, an integral part of the Britpop pop boom of the mid-90s and arguably its coolest band, is hanging out in a booth at the Volta art fair, surrounded by greyish abstract paintings. On closer inspection they’re blown-up, blurred photographs that show the light playing on some mirrors; over the top are smudged white brush strokes. This is the Lambent series, Frischmann’s latest collection of paintings, which she’s selling at the fair. Tell-tale red dots on the catalogue reveal that she has already sold three – and the fair hasn’t even officially opened yet.
Does she have collectors? “I do!” says Frischmann in her magnificently languid English drawl, unchanged from 11 years living in America. “And some of them don’t even know I was in Elastica. I did a short film for Volta and the guy opened by saying: ‘I have to let you know, I’m a real fan.’ I thought, ‘Oh, he means Elastica’, and it turned out he was talking about the paintings. It’s great.”
So for the benefit of those like him, a quick recap. Frischmann studied architecture at UCL in London, where in 1991 she formed Suede with her then boyfriend Brett Anderson. Leaving him for Blur’s frontman Damon Albarn (sparking the rivalry which would kick off Britpop), by the end of the following year she’d formed her own band, Elastica. Released in 1995, Elastica’s self-titled debut album was suave and insouciant art pop, which debuted at No 1 in the UK charts. Smart and charismatic, plus three-quarters female, Elastica had everything going for them. However they threw it away in the traditional rock’n’roll fashion, acquiring debilitating drug habits that led to them taking over five years to follow up their debut with second album The Menace, which tanked.
Frischmann wasn’t completely finished with music – she co-wrote her friend MIA’s single 2003 single Galang – but in 2005 she moved to Boulder, Colorado, to study painting at Naropa University. “I’ve always been a fan of the States,” she says. “We did a lot of touring here and I loved the land, I have a kind of pagan part of me.” She laughs. “Being on the bus early morning, travelling across America and seeing this incredible ancient landscape was really inspiring. I grew up in the city: I know London has its parks but you never get away from the sound of the traffic.”
Naropa is a Buddhist school where, Frischmann says, the students are taught “how to get ego out of the process and to be more connected with a relaxed presence and more in alignment with source energy. I know that sounds kind of hippyish”. She isn’t a Buddhist, however. “It’s too much of a cliche really, I couldn’t do it,” she says knowingly. “But I like a lot of the practices and I would definitely describe myself as somebody who’s interested in having a spiritual path. It’s an important part of my life.”
Some of her paintings, she says, including the Lambent series are inspired by these feelings: “Trying to turn to the light and make meaning out of our lives. Looking for faith, when there’s so much doubt.” She says they also explore the faith it takes to put your work out for public consumption the first place. “I like to show the process so all the mistakes and self-doubt and moments of uncertainty, I leave in the paintings – you can see all the areas where I’ve made marks and then scrubbed them out and tried something again.”
Frischmann says that she always wanted to be a painter growing up, but her parents persuaded her to study architecture because they didn’t believe she could make a living as an artist. (Her father Wilem arrived in the UK aged 15 as a refugee and Holocaust survivor and became a leading structural engineer, responsible for the design of London landmarks such as Centre Point and the former Nat West tower.)
Being in a band, Frischmann says, meant that “the creativity came out sideways”. In many ways hers is not a surprising career trajectory (certainly not compared with her former bandmate Donna Matthews, now a missionary working with the homeless). Elastica always had a sharp aesthetic and an angular, androgynous glamour which came from Frischmann, and which she still possesses today. “One of the things I loved in the band was the visual stuff – it was as fun as making the music.”
Since 2008 Frischmann has lived with her husband, a scientist, in the quiet and “incredibly beautiful” hills of North Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been painting for about 10 years, though it was only in 2013 that she started exhibiting her work. She spends her days working in her studio, walking in the redwood forests and protecting her four cats from coyotes. The landscape suffuses her paintings. “You can have this beautiful sunny day and as the fog’ll roll in everything goes from black and white into this luminous colour. I’ve been looking at it for years and it just recently started showing up in my work.”
It’s all a far cry from the days when Frischmann and Albarn were, much to their dismay, the Posh and Becks of Britpop, constantly in the tabloids as well as the music press. “At this point when I look at the videos of my performances I feel that it’s another person,” says Frischmann. Both Pulp and Blur have reformed and toured, but while Elastica have had plenty of offers, Frischmann has no desire to revisit the past – besides re-releasing the first Elastica album on vinyl, which the band (who she’s still in touch with) are doing next year. She hasn’t seen Albarn for years but is still friends with Anderson, who visits her when he’s in the area. She still sings, but only in the shower or, she laughs, to her cats.
“I don’t really have any desire to make music, to be honest,” she says. With painting, “I really feel I’ve found my medium. Also I think I’m a socially anxious person. I kind of deal with it but actually I’m really happy on my own. When I’m in the studio and things are unfolding and exciting I have that feeling that I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. I don’t think I ever really had that with music, it always felt like a rollercoaster ride and there was going to be a horrible smash.”
Which, as has been well documented, there was. Yet Frischmann has enough perspective to look back fondly on the good times. “I got to go all over the world and have a real snapshot of the planet in ’95, ’96, and I got to meet a lot of my heroes. One of the most valuable lessons was to realize that success isn’t necessarily enriching or enlivening. We live in a culture where there’s so much emphasis on celebrity and we all grow up feeling like being famous must be really great.”
Which, she concludes, it wasn’t – at least compared to her life now. “I really want my paintings to be seen in beautiful spaces with good light, and for people to have a chance to see them, but I really appreciate my life now and having a lot more privacy, more anonymity. It was a really great lesson to have had young in life because it’s helped me to have better priorities in terms of how I structure things and what I want. It’s fun to be able to start again and just reinvent.”
