FRANCES AVIVA BLANE : Me Me Me!

Frances Aviva Blane is a British painter who defines her work as ‘’concerned with fragmentation of paint and personality. I construct both abstract and figurative pictures. Figuration informs abstraction and vice versa. I use different media and like to keep things in a state of flux. Surprise is good. My paintings exist not to be understood but experienced.’’

Between 1991 and 1993 Blane attended The Slade School of Fine Art. She won an international scholarship to the Djerassi Artists’ Colony in California. Among other awards, Blane won the Graham Hamilton Drawing Prize in 1991 and in 1999 a Jerwood Drawing Award. In 2018 she was included in the John Moores Painting Prize. Since then she has been included in the Ruth Borchard self portrait exhibition and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. In 2022 Blane had a joint exhibition with Basil Beattie RA.

She is a well-known international artist and recently has shown with Frank Auerbach, Susan Stockwell and Jane McAdam Freud. In addition to having shown in London and Europe Blane exhibited in Belgium along with Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois at De Queeste Art Gallery in 2014. In 2016/2017 Blane had a solo show at the German Embassy London, Belgravia.

In 2019 Blane published FAB with Susie Orbach. In 2020 She published Who is Frances Aviva Blane? in association with Orbach, Tess Jaray RA. snd Penny Woolcock. In 2022 Blane published ON PAINT with Sacha Craddock. She is now working on a book called AUGUST with Orbach comprising charcoal drawings of heads. Additionally she has published BROKEN HEADS BROKEN PAINT, MORE, EMBASSY, and NOTHING.

Her work appears in many collections including The LSE, Jesus College Cambridge, Moorfields Eye Hospital London, The Sternberg Centre, The All Faiths Forum, The Tim Sayer Collection London, and The Doris Lockhart Collection. She is represented in London and Woodstock by Zuleika Gallery and in Belgium by De Queeste Art and online by Ecartspace.  Film director, Penny Woolcock, has made various films of Blane’s work including - Who is Frances Aviva Blane? Two Metres Apart with Susie Orbach, Fragmented and Portrait, the latter about Blane's work since the Pandemic.

In 2023 Blane exhibited with Susan Stockwell in Greece and London and Me Me Me! is her second solo exhibition at Zuleika Gallery following Fragmented in 2020. Blane says of her latest series that "the portraits in ‘Me Me Me !’are concerned with disintegration of paint and personality. As a painter, I am interested in how paint ‘behaves’, the quality of oil paint. I am fascinated by various methods of paint application, whether traditional or innovatory. The viscosity of thick paint suggests force and power, whereas the watercolour translucence of a highly dilute substance implies an ethereality of raindrops falling. Oil paint is an organic substance and will always react differently. The portraits in this exhibition are about breakdown and disintegration".