Frances Fawcett

When I joined SOAG, I returned to acrylic painting after twenty-five years working with pen and ink and carbon dust as a scientific illustrator. I started painting in a much freer way, free from the hard-edged minimalism of my younger years, and free also from the extreme precision of science illustration.

I find myself painting environments that invite the viewer in, or that the viewer can imagine inhabiting were they a different creature altogether—a small mammal or an insect—or that call attention to the interest and beauty of often overlooked places in the landscape. I like the fluid gestures of line in grass, wood, and water, and the solid uncompromising shapes of rock. I like the similarities that abound throughout the natural world – the whorls in wood grain and the whorls in water reflections, for example. And there is so much complex detail in the visual world. I think one of the artist’s tasks is to make try to make sense of it, and then to take what has been discovered and try to show it for all its worth.