Frances Donnelly Wolf

• Frances Donnelly Wolf Artist Statement
• Frances Donnelly Wolf Reviewer's Notes

Artist Statement

I begin with words. I collect phrases and segments of sentences from both poetry and prose as points of reference for my paintings. I collect what appeals to me upon a first read. I collect what makes me catch my breath.

My art is the obverse of the written word. In contrast to the poet or essayist who recasts and describes an image through the metaphor of words, mine is a qualified reverse ekphrasis. Rather than describe an image, one already created by another visual artist or of nature's own, in word form, I transcribe my response to, and understanding of, a segment of text into my own image.

Those writers who have particular appeal for me in this enterprise include William Wordsworth, George Steiner, Anna Akhamatova, Denise Levertov, and Karen Armstrong. The excerpts of their works that I collect vary in theme but all hold a special meaning for me.

My interest is not to illustrate what I read. Rather, at a fundamental level I want to create pictures that are grounded in the persistent and inevitable nature of the visual. I want to make images that emphasize the aesthetic presence of their subject matter. And it is through this notion of aesthetic presence that I also want to examine the relevance and meaning that certain of these authors' lines have for me.

That is, although I am guided by the sensual evidence of what I see around me, I use it less as a model for mimetic transcription. Instead, I regard such evidence as material for expressing my personal response to my readings.

Inspired by the concepts offered by the excerpts I collect, I think of my pictures as semantic spaces where I can capture what I sense of each subject's character, its ineffable quality that distinguishes it from others. Or as the poet Kay Ryan writes concerning the genre of still life, 'I want to paint...as though they (the subjects) were grace...each the reliquary of itself'.

In the end I look as Joseph Conrad describes in the Condition of Art, to find in tangible and familiar material, through a convergence of what I observe and of what I read, '...what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential - (its) one illuminating and convincing quality'.