It’s the right time to see Frances Aviva Blane’s work at two exhibitions – one in London and another in Oxfordshire.
Blane’s paintings switch from the totally abstract to amorphous heads. She makes no attempt at naturalism, the depiction of individual features or references to events, past or present. Look at The Brave Truth, her current shows at Zuleika Gallery’s two venues. Wired, for example, is only a flurry of drips and looping dribbles on a stark white ground. Only blue, red and a nest of black. It’s anything and nothing.
From a musical point of view, this filigree of brushstrokes dances to an internal melody, like a wind and string trio. Our natural desire to identify something is thwarted. If you are familiar with Blane’s heads, you might just discern a face with a bit of dark hair and streaks of red lipstick. But that was never the intention.
The minimal titles belie complexity. At first these canvases seem to be only about gestures and mark making. And yet they arouse a host of feelings and associations. It’s precisely the absence of figuration that immerses and stretches eye and mind to make connections. The connections may be internal and psychological but at the same time they reach out to you as an individual and to the world at large. For some, they may be too extreme, even upsetting. Even though they make no reference to bodies, people (except the heads) or events, they may appear tortured, grief stricken or simply joyful.
In a strange alchemy, Blane’s compositions arouse a complex and contradictory range of emotional territories and distant art historical associations. Are her colours and shapes like Goethes’ “elective affinities”? Black on Grey, for example, is a stormy, sweeping Romantic landscape, within which beauty and horror are inextricably combined. A looming black presence is defied by white hope. Irish philosopher John Burke’s interpretation of the Romantic sublime springs to mind. The painterly personality that emerges is enormously enjoyable and terrifying at the same time.
So what is this work really about? Does it even need to be “about” anything? The abstract artist Jules de Goede once said that all art is about expressing the artist’s personality. That may seem unashamedly individualistic, even solipsistic. But it is profoundly true, and acquires a universal dimension, if we understand personality as the entire totality of the artist’s relations with the world, an embodied individual practice. Making these works, the artist draws on a host of physical and intellectual resources, conscious and unconscious.
Why not take de Goede’s thought about personality together with Aristotle’s famous statement (gender modified) that “woman is a political animal”. For Aristotle “political” meant that humans could only live and thrive by living together with others in a “polis”, a society which has laws and customs. In other words, “political” not in the narrow sense in which it is understood today but John Donne’s sense, that no (wo)man is an island”.
There’s not much to be hopeful about in the global political situation, given the assault on living standards, eco-disaster and Putin’s ongoing effort to reduce an entire nation to rubble. But as current strike wave in Britain and the incredible resistance by Ukraine’s people shows, the human spirit keeps on reasserting its power and its potential to put an end to the current system.
By way of total contrast, in the micro-crucible of creative production, an 8.59minute film, On Painting, a collaboration between film maker / political activist Penny Woolcock and Frances Aviva Blane, was shot in the safety of the artist’s studio in London’s Kentish Town. Woolcock brings to life conversations between Blane, Woolcock herself, renowned psychotherapist Susie Orbach and me as art critic, which reveal the uncompromising discipline behind these mysteriously affecting compositions: a carefully curated dialectic of chance and deliberation.
Nonetheless, Blane’s spontaneous seeming images convey the explosive and fractured nature of our world in a truthful and also beautiful way. In Woolcock’s film, close-ups of the paintings and the discussion help us understand the tough discipline involved in making work that relies on inner impulse and paint alone.
Blane’s work is, yes, absolutely about paint. And the “paint” becomes about me and you, today’s world, our shared humanity and, by implication, our power to go where no one has gone before.
Frances Aviva Blane’s website
Blane’s work can be viewed at Zuleika Gallery Woodstock Oxfordshire and Zuleika Gallery London SW7 until 9 December 2022.She will be showing with De Queeste Art in Belgium in 2023 and with Susan Stockwell in London and Greece.