About Me
I am a graduate of Columbia University School of General Studies (Tony Harrison printmaking) and have also studied at the Art Students League with Charles Alston and others. The China Institute. I've had several one-person and group shows in New York City Galleries including Edna Gurewich, Bertha Urdang, Jock Truman, Susan Caldwell, and Barbara Gladstone Galleries as well as PS 1 of the Museum of Modern Art, The Clocktower, Cooper Union, and Pace University Gallery. I created installations in MoMA PS 1, New York City Hall and the former NYC World Trade Center. I moved to Baltimore 2 years after my studio was wrecked by 9/11.
My work is in many public and private collections including The New School for Social Research, Johnson & Johnson, Arco, JFK International Airport, Parasol Press, Vera C. List, Barbara & David Kornblatt and others. Since moving to Maryland, my work has been shown at Works on Paper in Philadelphia, the Walter Gomez Gallery in Baltimore, Heineman Myers Gallery in Bethesda and Gallery de Botschaft in Baltimore and the Creative Alliance.
"Now we speak of the effect of lights. Some are of stars… some of lamps and fire.” L. B. Alberti
There was a time when the universe was opaque; a period of compacted light.
As life evolved and a palpable humanity appeared a transparent light expanded and filled space. The reception of this light was innocent from the brightest white to the darkest shadow. I want to reclaim the immediacy of that light. The time of origin is always now.
I want the canvas to a place of convergence of the source of light and the habitable present. A clearing, a breathing space where each viewing is a new and direct experience. I make the paintings not as signs but places.
Each work in the series is oil paint on studio prepared linen, stretched over rigid strainers constructed with expansion joints to keep the surfaces taut through extremes of humidity. In this year's work I want to push the achromatic palette until it brims over with irreducible light. It is an encounter with the limitations of surface and edge and opens the space beyond those boundaries to rediscover the communion between a temporal presence and an expansive content.
Each painting reflects innumerable echoes and afterimages, as filled with itself as a landscape. I want to generate not only a visual impression but a place, lucid and generous, first seen in the eye/I of the painter and then by the viewer, caught unaware, as when walking you see yourself reflected in some surface that causes you to pause, stop still, and look at the view.
Francine Halvorsen