Sharon Frayne
  • Home
  • My Work
  • About
  • Contact me
  • Blog
  • Caught Between the Walls
  • Upcoming Events

Welcome to WORDS and ART

Picture
Picture

Picture
15/01/2021
Today, I'm the featured writer in Joan Dempsey's Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio. Here's my response to the question: When did you first realize you wanted to write a novel? Was there a particular person or experience that inspired you?

​My younger sisters' bedroom adjoined mine, with nightly consequences. I invented a communication code and taped it to the back walls of our side-by side closets. Long after we were supposed to be asleep, I'd go into the closet and communicate with them through a series of special knocks. Taking two flashlights, I crawled into the dark hallway and shone lights on the back wall of their bedroom. The wild, invented stories began. Often, they were inspired by a children's novel I'd just read. It was important to keep this a secret from our parents, who'd ruin all the fun if they knew!

Knock, knock. Time for a story.

Linda Hankin, an artist on the Merry-go round of life

11/6/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Artist Linda Hankin, whose work is currently on display at the Pumphouse Gallery in Niagara-on-the Lake, peeked mischievously over her bright red rimmed glasses and informed me that her early paintings can’t be shown because of today’s volatile and politically sensitive situation. We were having tea together and discussing her lengthy and fulfilling career and her current show at the NOTL gallery. Her large collection of colourful and expressive paintings, created during a broad range of historic and social influences, dazzles the eye. She calls it ‘Contemporary Realism.’  
 
Hankin was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1948, and has lived in Montreal, Toronto and Niagara Falls. Her career has taken her throughout North America and Europe as she absorbed images and influences that are visualized in her work.
 
We chatted about her artistic philosophy and painting techniques. Like the famous Franco-Russian artist, Marc Chagall, her paintings simmer with mystery and potential. Tiny treasures, acquired in little shops around the world and hidden portraits of humans and animal forms magically weave stories and enchantment on the painted surfaces. Hankin says that artists are clairvoyant and that her approach to creativity is both empirical and accidental.
 
She lives a solitary, simple existence on a large farm with her beloved dog and cats, surrounded by nature and her artwork.  She meditates and the absorbed inner influences of the country, her collections and experiences, percolate through her subconscious and flow into her work.  The Pumphouse show features vivid, dramatic paintings that draw the viewer in closer to examine the fantastical images that prance and float across the canvas. I asked Hankin about her display of small scale animal sculptures and landscapes painted on miniature screens and boxes.
 
“They are paintings that have left the canvas and are going three dimensional,” she replied.  These whimsical papier-mache cats and mixed media pieces create an interesting counterpoint to the paintings.
 
After our meeting, I stood in the middle of the Pumphouse Gallery show and turned slowly about to absorb the dazzling florals, dreamscapes, landscapes, still life paintings and fanciful creatures that almost seem to vibrate off the walls.  Brilliant red poppies and roses, luminous purple irises, glowing yellow daffodils, swirling blue clouds and floating landscapes filled with dreamy figures and colourful horses surrounded me. In one large work, a circus performer lunges a polka dot horse through a carnival of mysterious, yet somehow familiar objects. Standing amidst this energy and excitement in the gallery, I remembered a childhood sensation of riding a prancing pony on a merry-go-round while the world swirled by. That’s the feeling that Linda Hankin’s paintings and sculpture create.  Only Linda can see her controversial early works, but everyone can enjoy the pieces currently on display.
 
It’s worth taking a trip to the Pumphouse Gallery in NOTL to join Linda Hankin on an exotic journey through a life filled with imagination, passion and talent.  The Pumphouse exhibit is on display until November 27, 2017.
 
 
 
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Sharon Frayne is a writer and artist. She is a member of the Canadian Author's Association, the Niagara Writer's Circle and the Pumphouse Art Gallery. She looks for the universal experience and the mystery in everyday things.

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • My Work
  • About
  • Contact me
  • Blog
  • Caught Between the Walls
  • Upcoming Events