Driving Into the Ocean
Sherie Franssen
8.375x11 P.B.
20pgs.

1-60052-029-7

Franssen approaches each new painting looking for trouble. She has no notion of the finished composition. Applying her pigments in broad strokes to vast canvases, she works ten hours at a stretch, often covering the same surface fifty or one hundred times over a period of weeks. Figures emerge and are consumed, or perhaps, as in “one way of putting the same thing”, they linger, teetering on the edge of abstraction. These pictorial jostlings animate her paintings. The human forms that sometimes appear in Franssen’s art are active participants in her process of creation. They present her with interesting problems. Franssen’s struggles with them are physical as much as they are emotional. Her canvases come alive with the exertion.

-Jonathon Keats