This was published 7 years ago
Annie Franklin's Illumination at Nancy Sever Gallery has gem-like paintings
By Sasha Grishin
Annie Franklin: Illumination. Nancy Sever Gallery, 4/6 Kennedy Street, Kingston. Until December 18.
Annie Franklin's new exhibition can be described as a "summer show" or even a "Christmas show" with radiating small gem-like paintings of exquisite detail and a touch of the naif celebrating the Australian coastal landscape with its environmentally sensitive grassy woodlands and wetlands.
Annie Franklin, Winter Sun and Frost, Jerrabomberra, 2016 in Illumination at Nancy Sever Gallery.
Franklin is best known as a printmaker – a very fine and politically motivated printmaker – who spent many years working with Indigenous communities. Almost two decades ago, she settled at Wapengo Lake on the Sapphire Coast of NSW, where she discovered her own Eden and she has become a well-known voice in the Bega art community.
In this exhibition, as has been the case with her work for a number of years, there is a mixture of an ornamental tapestry and a peculiar "worm's eye view" of the world, where the artist records in precious detail both the grand image as well as the minutiae of the insect world. The paintings are bursting with energy and fecundity, where intricate detail is combined with a quirky sense of humour. There is the quality of naif hedonism that is discovered in the beauty of the natural surroundings with works that are ornate yet loaded with anecdotal detail and where there is a precious intricacy in execution with just a hint of "otherness".
Annie Franklin, Ground breaking, 2016 in Illumination at Nancy Sever Gallery.
Franklin's miniaturist and obsessive manner of work is seductive to the eye and makes few challenges on the intellect. She describes her work as an illumination of her backyard and the nature that surrounds her. She sets out to shine "a light on the beauty of the small kingdoms – the world that is underfoot and under-appreciated; the insects, small birds, leaf litter and mulch, the fungi and lichen, the cycle of decay and new growth, the industry with literally the weight of the world on its shoulders, without which all life would cease to exist".
While it is difficult not to be seduced by these small glowing painted panels, and the Canberra audience has made this into a rare, almost sell-out exhibition, in some of the paintings the sugar content does get a bit high. At her best, as in Ground Breaking, Winter Sun and Frost, Jerrabomberra, and many panels in the Backyard Lifecycles series, there is a precious excitement of discovery, however some of the paintings can grow repetitive with little development from one miniature scene to the next.
Franklin's little paintings are joyous, colourful, exquisitely finished and honest little celebrations of a private Eden. While they may lack something of the tough polemical rigour of her earlier screenprints, they possess a quiet tranquillity – like meditations on the beauty, magic and complexity of nature and its elaborate system of ecosystems.