Oil Paintings by FRANCES DONNELLY WOLF
Artist's Reception, Friday, October 20, 2006, 5-8:00
featuring classical Jazz by MuZette

Nella casa del mio papa  54 x 36 oil on canvas

(Elizabethtown, PA) Lynden Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Frances Donnelly Wolf’s surrealistic oil paintings.  The artist’s reception for this exhibit will be held on Friday, October 20 from 5 pm until 8 pm.

With an intense desire to visually articulate phrases and segments of sentences from both poetry and prose, Frances Donnelly Wolf paints within four series: Skyscapes, Geometrics, Still Life Studies and Portraits in Imagination.  But these four series certainly do not define the boundaries in which Wolf creates her visionary world.

As Wolf describes it: “I try to recreate some sense of a world of which I have no physical sense.  I try to recreate, through known everyday objects and posed figures, a sense of the ineffable which is their animating force.” 

Titles such as “Waiting to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony” and “She was free to choose, choice being integral to humanness” are the statements that lay the groundwork for her sense of a world. That groundwork is only the starting point of an exceedingly deep narrative, a narrative that is at times playful or serious in its imagery. 

The most striking imagery is from her Portraits in Imagination series, which bring an overall ethereal reality through a cornucopia of artistic styles: minimalism, surrealism, cubism, expressionism, realism and impressionism all living together on the same canvas.  The combination of these styles empower Wolf’s paintings with a worldliness all their own. 

Perhaps one of the most powerful vehicles for her express comes from the juxtaposition of objects and the inclusion of multiple surface planes within the same piece.  Her Geometrics series, for example, couples stark traditional patterning with loosely brushed floral imagery or surrealistic portraiture.

Frances Donnelly Wolf is a York County artist whose works have been displayed in selected exhibitions at the Lancaster Museum of Art, the Whitaker Center, Franklin & Marshall College and York Arts.  She graduated from Bryn Mawr with a Masters in Art History in 2000 after undergraduate studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, England and Franklin & Marshall College.

The opening reception for this exhibition is Friday, October 20 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and will include a performance by MuZette, a flute and cello duet combining the styles of classical, jazz, celtic and folk music with Tom and Laurie Reese.

Lynden Gallery is located on Market Street in Downtown Elizabethtown and is open Tuesday thru Saturday 9:00 to 5:00, and evenings by appointment.  The gallery is handicap accessible and offers convenient parking.  For more information call 717-367-9236 or refer to www.lyndengallery.com.