Frances Boyle

Frances Boyle is a painter, poet and film maker, driven by storytelling and her place in the World. Her intuitive paintings capture remembered and recorded moments in time, peopled by fellow travellers in her life. It is emotional work that explores existential, political and mythological themes juxtaposed with the liminal space of memory. Her paintings are often located within a ‘wide-angle’ exterior landscape or a ‘close-up’ intimate psychological interior. They are momento mori stills, recording the passage of non-linear time. The natural world, Cinema, photography, super 8 film grain, stained glass, medieval wall paintings, old post card ephemera and ancient frescoes, all inform the ideas, materiality and colour in her painting. Frances became aware that she was a synesthete when she realised other people didn’t associate words with colours or see time, past, present and future, as a three-dimensional infinite spiral going downwards anticlockwise. She thought everyone did.
Frances’ current practice is a series of cyclical history paintings set in imagined seasonal landscapes. Part autobiographical, part allegorical, they draw on the Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone’s descent into the underworld, to convey a sense of solastalgia. Frances has assembled a cast of characters into what she describes as monumental postcards to the past, present and future through which she conveys the timeless longing and grief that is common to everyone. The possible “wish you were here” messages written on the back will remain a mystery and unresolved. Through the process of scraping back layers of jewel bright paint, gestural brush marks, texture and glazing, Frances processes her own grief and pain to make sense of her world. We are all tourists navigating our own narratives.
francesboyle.co.uk
@francesboyleart