Frances Carter Stephens: Beautiful the Wild
+2 Frances Carter Stephens: Beautiful the Wild
Frances Carter Stephens: Beautiful the Wild
Frances Carter Stephens: Beautiful the Wild
Frances Carter Stephens: Beautiful the Wild
“My work is a visual response to landscape and weather.” Frances Carter Stephens is speaking rather simplistically about her colorful abstract paintings.
It’s true, Stephens’ oil paintings and drawings are inspired by nature, specifically the landscape along the Texas Gulf Coast. She focuses on land, sea and sky, with particular emphasis on atmospheric conditions.
Her artistic process, however, goes beyond simply recording nature. Visual data gets filtered through Stephens’ imagination and emotions into abstracted images rendered with deliciously distorted color and form. Her oil paint often has a luminous quality. The resulting painterly abstract language is lovely and powerful.
You might not want to pass up the chance to see Frances Carter Stephens’ art at the Jung Center. Stephens’ exhibition Frances Carter Stephens: Beautiful the Wild ends on March 31, 2022. About the artworks displayed, the Jung Center said they express “untamed nature.”
And Stephens made it clear that they do. Although for quite a few years I’ve detected in her art a dialogue with the mystical aspects of existence. As if she’s entertaining extradimensional hidden reality. Inspired by a thunderstorm or shoreline, might she search for deeper truths about who we are and our place in the cosmos. Jung of course was open to unseen reality.