We’re pleased to share Alison Oldham’s review of a new book featuring work by Frances Aviva Blane produced since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
Oldham, who is former arts editor of one of the UK’s longest running quality local newspapers, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, says this is one work she would love to “take home”. The great news is that the book format allows you to do just that.
It’s hard these days to see art in the flesh, so the large format and high quality of FRANCES provide a sense of immediacy, of being physically there, up close to these high voltage canvases. It’s an awesome collaboration between the artist, photographers and designers Joe Corr and Tim Peters.
Between the images are texts by three very different writers: noted psychotherapist and activist Susie Orbach, critic and OOF magazine editor Eddy Frankel (yes, he runs an art gallery in Tottenham football stadium) plus Real Democracy Movement’s own art critic, Corinna Lotz.
“Disconcerting, Discombobulating, Discomfiting”
By Alison Oldham
I found it curious that two of the three contributors to a new book about Frances Aviva Blane should use a word to describe her paintings of heads that is not in common parlance. Susie Orbach and Eddy Frankel both find these images “discombobulating”, which on investigation means “throwing into confusion”. Frankel goes further and says they have a disconcerting and discomfiting feeling. And he is right.
Her subject matter, Frances tells Frankel, is “the disintegration of paint and personality” and with the heads she is “trying to paint the surface of an emotion”. Many are clearly self-portraits, often with her signature dark glasses as in Summer 2021 (above), but there are also images of loved ones and friends, including Orbach (below), and depictions of emotions.
The portrait of Orbach, drawn from observation during the pandemic, has been selected for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2021. Frankel has a deft round-up of what the head paintings offer: “They are familiar and alien, abstract and figurative, earthly and ethereal, real and fictional.”
Yet the odd thing is that although so many of the heads are bleak – the drawing Yellow Head 4 (above) alarmingly so – most photographs in the book show Frances smiling. And with good reason because these are works to be proud of. Equally so the book. The essays are illuminating, as is the presentation, with details of large paintings opposite images of the whole work, as with Letter 2, below.
This painting elicited a spirited response from Corinna Lotz who saw in it “a joy, an elation in heavily worked textures” catching the light. She lists the reds used: vermillion, ruby, crimson, burgundy, scarlet, cardinal – intensified by scoring to reveal the black undercoat. “The gashes surge, carrying the paint along with them, yellow flames leaping in and out of a red ocean.”
Which brings me to my usual practice in this column of choosing which work I would want to take home – or in this case two, an abstract and a head: the darkly sumptuous Fool, and the enigmatic Closed – both below. Illustrations can never convey one of the vital aspects of Frances’s art – the exuberant painting technique – but here their quality is so superb that they make a fine try.
FRANCES. Starmount Publishing £50: Waterstones
Frances Aviva Blane
First published on the Shippon Gallery website
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