Frances Aviva Blane
Frances Aviva Blane:
Blane started life as a painter in her early thirties. She suggests her meaningful life started then. Emerging from despair, Blane learnt to draw, first privately and then at art school, working ceaselessly from the model. And then, in every sense, from looking in the mirror.
She looked to German Expressionism and American Abstract Expressionism, searching for a way to work. Like the artists she admires, Blane’s work is born out of existential and real struggle. She paints herself and her life, pain, grief, loss and sheer desperation from the inside out.
As I consider Blane’s current work I find myself referring back to a section of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb seminal letter to the New York Times in 1943:
"We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. […] It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless."
