DRIVING INTO THE OCEAN Sherie Franssen8.375 x 11 PB • 20 Pgs • $10.00 • ISBN 1-60052-029-7
Sherie Franssen approaches each new painting looking for trouble and with no notion of the finished composition. Applying her pigments in broad strokes to vast canvasses, she works ten hours at a stretch, often covering the same surface fifty or a hundred times over. 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. Franssen’s struggles with them are physical as much as they are emotional. Her canvases come alive with the exertion. -Jonathon Keats
