Frances Hynes: Houses, Doorways, and Windows: Dreams, Memories, and Fantasies
June, 2022, Frances Hynes, My Paintings, For Liz
The paintings invite the viewer to create his/her own narrative. The paintings listen to the viewer.
Pemaquid with Gold Sails: The Golden Sails of the Ship may evoke: voyage, odyssey, crossing. A house partially hidden by the cliff may denote shelter and safe harbor. And the tiny figures on the cliff, Are they watching the voyage of life?
Cottage with Couple: A house is a place of containment and shelter and an embodiment of home. Home: a place of belonging, safety, contentment, a vital center, a place to rest and be fully oneself. The concept of coming and going, transitional moments are of interest to the artist, are the two figures leaving home or returning?
Two Trees, Spring: Trees have an animating Sprit, a Life Force. Two trees, holding their ground, back to life after a long Winter. Birds sheltered and nesting in motherly branches. We and the trees seem alike: feet holding our ground, arms reaching up, striving like branches. There is an architectural grid woven into the face of this painting, a hidden structure and scaffold adds another more abstract dimension.
Door to the Sea: Find the Door! Often windows and doorways are hidden in the fabric of the painting. Here, a hidden window to let in the moonlight, the sunlight, the colors of the world and the dark of night. Window is the threshold between here and there, inside and outside, a constant theme in my work.
Summer Place: To the Islands: Islands are fascinating to the imagination, magnetic. Islands evoke escape, solitude and refuge. Islands can be blessed places of retreat: eternally fertile, magical, mystical. Dwellings, stopping places in this mystical landscape, and boats carrying voyagers dot the waterscape. This painting evokes transparency another hallmark of the work of their artist.
Scenes from Life/Layers of Time: Here and There, Then and Now, Inside/Outside is suggested in this painting. This painting was created over a span of years alluding to the richness of layered human experience. Figures: walking, watching, waiting, greeting. Neighborhoods past and present. Find the hidden structure of the house and doorway, and overall grid scaffolding.
Pemaquid Cottage: The shelter of a home, the grid of windows, like a stairway from lower left to upper right. Our cottage is bathed in the light and splendor of full sun: Exultant and radient with the energy of sun, the dynamic solar rays transferring creative, healing energy and rejuvenation. The color green surrounds the cottage: Green: fresh, restful, the color of Summer.
Night Sky and Quarter Moon: A slender arc of light, the crescent of a new moon. A time to make wishes and make silver coins increase as will the moon as the month progresses. The eternal cycling, disappearing and returning of the moon serves as a metaphor for existence. Suggesting stability: the structure of a house. Clouds suggest travel and transformation, freedom, tranquility and release from the quotidian, the everyday, the terrestrial.
Red Sea: Sunset or Dawn? Beginnings and Endings. A house on the cliffs. Wind and water moves and changes shape: formlessness and form.
The Bridge: A bridge is suggested in this painting. Linking opposite sides of a landscape the bridge is structure and pathway. A suggestion of the river (Damarascotta, Androscoggin, Hudson) and waterfall. For a moment, contemplate rivers: waters flowing as time itself: overland, underground, inside and outside. Rivers: the veins of Mother Earth. Vertical and horizontal lines give the painting structure and suggest movement up, down and across. Time lines?