March 4th – April 27th
Artist’s Reception: Thursday, March 9th 6-8 pm. Brief Gallery Talk 7pm
Fran’s acrylic landscape paintings are colorful, expressionistic and spontaneous in style. They reflect her love of nature and the variety in landscapes. Fran says her “daily artistic observation and painting method consists of a type of calligraphic shorthand in editing a composition. The process of mixing and applying paint in an alla prima manner is intended to record and share the moment with the viewer.”
Fran Wolok’s Artist Statement for 2023
My daily painting practice creates different choices to feed my artistic passion: variations incomposition, its scale and perspectives, materials, a wide range of palette choices, and my inspiration to feel the seasonal weather conditions, life’s frailties and continuum.
Overall, my personal vision is to paint expressively, record and interpret fragments of seasonal landscape with its shifting light and seasonal patterns while abstracting nature. I am motivated by a landscape’s color combinations and the opportunity to be outside painting-to record how the experience feels.
My technique consists of covering the front of the painting with gesso as well as sealing the surface from the back of a painting on wood so it will be protected when working plain air. By adding a visual texture, whether drips, sprays, and swipes with a broken credit card. I fill the entire composition in a gestural manner, working quickly to record the shadows before the light shifts. When satisfied, I take the intuitive painting and check tonal values, increase clarity and refine details. I look for the essence of the composition, the radiance of color, and make more discriminating choices in the final round. When the paint is completely dry, time is taken to examine the composition with fresh eyes-and correct weak areas. Prior to framing, the final stage would be to add a gloss polymer varnish with ultraviolet protection. I have also worked on prepared gessoed, rolls of canvas as large as six feet across. They were painted in an abstracted nature in acrylic, sealed with a gloss polymer, and displayed unstretched at an exhibition at Bank One in Ferndale.
There are many artists that have influenced my work. Initially, the seemingly simple gestural strokes and colors of Henri Matisse, the patterning of Bonnard, the recording of daily life with Fairfield Porter and Edward Hopper. I continue to enjoy the work of Vincent Van Gogh-with his use of veridian green and white, vivid backgrounds, as well as his available subject matter and the numerous output of work in his lifetime. I delight in the small figures that counterbalance landscapes and his choice of colors. Another artist with the vision of the seasonal passage of time is Wolf Kahn. I recognize his composition with brilliant colors at daybreak and the distance of a multi banded horizontal composition.
My artistic approach when phrasing a line in a gestural manner with intuitive color choices is important to me to relay how a composition feels.
