As the film writer Ray Carney said: “We should jettison systems of processing and packaging in order to establish contact with states of purity and innocence.”   I try to keep this in my thought when I'm working.

I do not fit into any easy catagory and I refuse to limit myself to any one “style”.  I am not interested in consistency, I am interested in the never ending flow of ideas that never remain in a single channel, just as a river changes its course over time.   

Henry Miller, that great old man of letters, told us that

The art of living is based on rhythm, on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all the aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, 'the dance of life', as Havelock Ellis called it.
 
My work often explores the nature of the relationship of human beings with the natural world, as well as the consequences of losing the sense of that connection.  I also try to have some FUN!

Thank you for your attention.

Frances Barrineau
artistfran@earthlink.net
 

ABOUT THE ARTIST:   

I was born in Atmore, Alabama in 1946, but lived in Japan for a year and West Germany for two years, where my father, an Army officer, was stationed.  During our travels in Europe we visited the Louvre, which made a great impression on me.  The paintings were so huge and overpowering and I felt them pull me into them as into an alternate universe.
    When my father retired from the Army in 1957 we settled in the Florida Panhandle where I lived there most of my life.  In 1990 I moved to Texas, and from 1997 – 1999 I lived in Germany.  After five years in new England I have relocated to Northern Virginia.  There were no painters in my immediate family, but I cannot remember a time when I did not consider myself one.  I remember as a child of nine seeing a movie called "A Dog of Flanders" with Theodore Bikel portraying  a painter, and I think that reinforced my desire to be an artist.  
    The artists that have most influenced me are Clyde Connoly, Paul Klee,  Pablo Picasso,  Stuart Davis,  Willem DeKooning,  Mark Rothko,  Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock,  Henri Matisse,  Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gaughin, Rogert Motherwell,  Helen Frankenthalter,  Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg.
    I completed a Bachelors in Studio Art at the University of West Florida in Pensacola in 1969.  We were the first graduating class, and there was a sense that something new was being created.  Living in a small Gulf Coast city did not exactly offer great opportunities for artists, so I painted at night and on weekends when I could and held various day jobs to pay the bills.
    Prompted by interest in joining the Foreign Service as a Cultural Attache in the late 1980's, I studied French in Quebec and completed a Masters Degree in International Affairs at Florida State University in Tallahassee, focusing on French culture and history.
    I married Mark L. Littlefield in 1990, and we moved to Houston, Texas.  In 1991 I began to paint full time, and in April of 1992, I gave birth to my only child, Michelle Gaston Littlefield.  We lived in Dallas for two years, then moved to Herzogenaurach, Germany, in December of 1996.  In August of 1999 we moved to Townsend, Massachusetts, then to Ashburn, Virginia in March of 2005.