BIOGRAPHY

Frances Barrineau

Oil painting, acrylics, pastel, collage, goache and mixed media drawing.

Exhibitions

Cracks in the Pavement, 2005

First Frontier Collage Society, 2002

Guilford Art Center, Guilford, Connecticut , 2001

Coleman Center, York Alabama 2001

Pensacola Cultural Center, Pensacola, Florida 1996

E.A.S.L. Blind Auction, Dallas, Texas, 1995

Justine's Milam Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1995

500 X Gallery Show, Dallas, Texas, 1995, 1996

Art League of Houston 12 X 12 Show, 1990

University of West Florida Alumni Exhibition, 1987

Art on the Tracks 3 X 5 Show, Pensacola, Florida, 1988

Education

M.A. International Affairs. Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. June 1988 to May 1989.

B.S. Studio Art. University of West Florida. August 1967 to August 1969, 1985-87.

A.A. Pensacola Junior College. August 1964 to May 1966.

History

I was born in Atmore, Alabama in 1946, but lived in Japan and West Germany when I was young. When my father retired from the Army in 1957 we settled in Pensacola Florida and I lived there most of my life until moving to Texas in 1990. I am married to Mark Littlefield and we have a daughter, Michelle, who was born in Houston in 1992. In 1997 we moved to Herzogenaurach Germany for two-and-a-half years. Five years in Townsend Massachusetts followed, and in 2005 we moved to Ashburn Virginia where we now reside. There were no painters in my immediate family, but I cannot remember a time when I did not consider myself one, and that was what I always wanted to be. I remember as a child seeing a movie called "A Dog of Flanders" with Theodore Bikel as a painter, and I think that made a real impression on me. I liked Vincent Van Gogh when I was young, and Paul Klee and Renoir. When I look at art now I like Rothko, Pollock, Matisse, Cezanne, Frankenthalter, Twombly, Rauschenberg. There is some O'Keefe in there somewhere, I think.

I took a Bachelors in Studio Art at the University of West Florida in Pensacola in 1969, which opened in 1967. We were the first graduating class, and there was a sense that something new was being created.

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 was not offered a post and, in retrospect, this was a good thing because it threw me back on myself and I had to face the fact that the only thing I was ever really interested in was being an artist.

Over the years I've received vital support and encouragement from Tut Riddick, an artist in Mobile Alabama, who has known me all my life. She arranged for my first one-man show at the Coleman Center in York, Alabama in the summer of 2001. Tut is one of the shining lights of art in the Deep South and her work on behalf of artists there well deserves the recognition she has been given.

Most of my work has been non-figurative, but often with a stron landscape feeling. I've done several series: Northern California, Jazz, Venetian collages, Cajun Mardi Gras Masks, and the Canyon Series, on which I am presently working. These paintings were inspired by a trip we took to New Mexico a few summers ago. Currently I am taking my long-time interest in landscape into a more figurative phase while adding horses. Living in horse country has offered me the opportunity to ride and I enjoy all aspects of the horse scene in Northern Virginia.

If you have any comments about it, or any questions, feel free to contact me at any time.

Frances Barrineau