Frances Donnelly Wolf

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

Reviewer's Notes

By J.W. Mahoney

Developments in science and art are often secretly kin, and it is not surprising either to aesthetically sensitive scientists or to informed artists that a change in one field is simultaneous with a revolution in another. Toward the end of the 19th century, the birth of psychology coincided directly with the emergence in visual art of works whose center, whose practice, and whose content lay not in simply recording the facts of the visible world, but in allowing the artists' psyches a full license to explore and express whatever visions - or truths - might be found. By the birth of the last century, then, we began to see art in another way entirely, as, first, an expression of a living awareness. When Surrealism was born after World War I, the dream, whether sleeping or waking, was considered a reality of a higher order or at least an experience as fully real as that of a cornfield in summer. Frances Wolf's art, which is clearly set in her own interior worlds, is a reflection of a specific kind of reality, visionary reality. And we need to look no further than our own dreams to find stories as strange as hers are.

The paintings of Frances Wolf are almost always narratives. Indeed, their titles are fragments of texts or quotations, pieces of a continuing tale peopled by dream-beings that, like the skeletal figures of Alberto Giacometti's sculptures, represent Everyman or Everywomen. They are often hairless, sometimes alone, sometimes active, sometimes contemplative, and placed in open spaces occasionally defined by quiet, even geometries. In "... that uncertain heave ..." of 1999, a naked human is crouched upon a grid of horizontal squares painted with symmetrical geometric forms. Beneath the grid is nothing but pure blue sky. The painting could be an allegory on the human condition, our suspension on colorful patterns of being, above - and below - an infinite space. Or it may well be the beginning or end of a set of unimaginable circumstances occurring in quite another world.

"let me see thee sink into a dream," a painting of 1997, depicts another hairless figure with its arms outstretched in the immediate foreground, standing behind a long row of trees whose stark, brown shadows stretch across the width of the picture, generating a deep perspectival depth. This drama is plainly openly imaginative - a possible crucifixion figure, certainly - but in a place whose natural rhythms and whose light is unanchored in any earthly realm. In "We are laid asleep in body..." from 1995, a blonde woman in a full gown tumbles, upside down, from a world of earth-colored, rectangular buildings, cloudy skies, and green grass, into a starry universe below it. Her head is in the stars and her feet in the air, much to sensations of a "falling" dream; but this image is also an archaic symbol of self-illumination, the familiar Hanged Man of the Tarot deck, in which a youth is hanged upside down by his feet, a metaphor for a reorientation of perspective from that of ordinary life into a vision of the transpersonal.

Not all of Frances Wolf's work is expressly visionary. In a recent still life, "Punctum," she paints a green pepper on a plate placed on a table. Its lighting is so direct and its singularity so obvious, however, that its abstractly symbolic character is as implied as it is concealed. Here at the beginning of a new century, science is telling us that matter itself appears to be conscious, at a sub-atomic level, that it makes up its fate as it goes along. It creates worlds, as we create worlds, out of the freedom of its imagination. So whether or not Frances Wolf paints a pepper or a waking embryo on a curved belt of geometric shapes, as in "And in that silence ... the voice of mountain torrents," she is quietly - and self-evidently - creating a universe.

J.W. Mahoney is a Washington-based artist, critic, and independent curator who is currently Washington's Corresponding Editor for Art in America, and a Contributing Editor to The New Art Examiner.