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Frances Thomas was born in Parry Sound, ON. She received both her BFA and MFA from York University, Toronto, ON. She has participated in residencies in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland and Triangle Arts in Brooklyn, New York and in 2016 spent three months in Berlin on a self-directed residency. Her paintings were featured in a solo exhibition, “but wait”, with an accompanying catalogue, at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie ON, in 2009/10. She is the recipient of the Sarick Purchase Award for excellence in thesis work. Thomas currently lives and works in Barrie, Ontario. She has exhibited in Barrie, Montreal, Edmonton, Toronto and New York and her work is in the permanent collections of the MacLaren Art Centre, Bank of Montreal (BMO) and York University.
Artist Statement
For me painting is a way of thinking. I have always just followed the work. Even if something is completely different from what I have made before, I know it’s right—it either works or it doesn’t as an artwork. I am interested more in what is happening in the moment, with the materials and my instincts, and less with rigorous conceptual strategies. My hope is that the viewers who come face to face with the work can follow their own pathways through the internal logic of each piece and find something to hang on to and enjoy.
(Additional Thoughts)
I am a painter and printmaker in pursuit of images that are newly strange and exciting, and that feel real. By real I mean that in each work the media, in its material substance and direction, and the image that arrives through an iterative process, resolve into a container of emotional content. Art can be a vehicle of relation and connection; in fact, I am relying heavily on that as my pathway to intimate connections with others. So much of human interaction today has to do with competing fleeting attention(s) and what many of us want is to feel genuine connection.
Relying on an improvisational playing out of materials and ideas I attempt to create a poetic distillation of reverie and apprehension. My method involves depending on a set of instinctive responses within the work activity. My decision-making procedure usually begins with a largely intuitive application of paint, which triggers a chain of responses. I do not plan a work in advance. I prefer that the work evolve out of necessity, out of an internal structure or logic brought about by the drawing and painting activity. It is in the making that I arrive at what I am trying to say, at what needs to be left at the surface.
I am intending to persuade the viewer, not in terms of duress, but seduction. I am sitting out here in the ether (read in the studio spending a lot of time alone) creating painted spaces of incident, human fragility, pain and joy, all the things it means to be human. These spaces are intended as meeting places that I am inviting/persuading the viewer to enter with me. That I use the language of abstraction has to do with its unique capacity for ambiguity and complexity, it's truth telling ability as in the way that fiction often is more direct than non-fiction, or how a poem, given how it is encrypted, requires unravelling, like the slow unfolding of a painting, and with patience and curiosity we discover their mysteries, we discover something profoundly enduring and all-encompassing, something to hold on to.
Artist Statement
For me painting is a way of thinking. I have always just followed the work. Even if something is completely different from what I have made before, I know it’s right—it either works or it doesn’t as an artwork. I am interested more in what is happening in the moment, with the materials and my instincts, and less with rigorous conceptual strategies. My hope is that the viewers who come face to face with the work can follow their own pathways through the internal logic of each piece and find something to hang on to and enjoy.
(Additional Thoughts)
I am a painter and printmaker in pursuit of images that are newly strange and exciting, and that feel real. By real I mean that in each work the media, in its material substance and direction, and the image that arrives through an iterative process, resolve into a container of emotional content. Art can be a vehicle of relation and connection; in fact, I am relying heavily on that as my pathway to intimate connections with others. So much of human interaction today has to do with competing fleeting attention(s) and what many of us want is to feel genuine connection.
Relying on an improvisational playing out of materials and ideas I attempt to create a poetic distillation of reverie and apprehension. My method involves depending on a set of instinctive responses within the work activity. My decision-making procedure usually begins with a largely intuitive application of paint, which triggers a chain of responses. I do not plan a work in advance. I prefer that the work evolve out of necessity, out of an internal structure or logic brought about by the drawing and painting activity. It is in the making that I arrive at what I am trying to say, at what needs to be left at the surface.
I am intending to persuade the viewer, not in terms of duress, but seduction. I am sitting out here in the ether (read in the studio spending a lot of time alone) creating painted spaces of incident, human fragility, pain and joy, all the things it means to be human. These spaces are intended as meeting places that I am inviting/persuading the viewer to enter with me. That I use the language of abstraction has to do with its unique capacity for ambiguity and complexity, it's truth telling ability as in the way that fiction often is more direct than non-fiction, or how a poem, given how it is encrypted, requires unravelling, like the slow unfolding of a painting, and with patience and curiosity we discover their mysteries, we discover something profoundly enduring and all-encompassing, something to hold on to.
| 2019_frances_thomas_cv.pdf |
Frances wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC).
Represented by Peter Robertson Gallery.