Gallery Artists / Ruth Franklin

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Born in Kent, England in 1964. In 1983, Ruth was accepted into the Brighton Art School where she obtained a BA Honors Degree in Fine Arts. Her taste in art is diverse, ranging from painterly masters of color, line and light, Chaim Soutine, Honore Daumier, Goya, Rembrant and Van Gogh to contemporary painters, Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach and Richard Diebenkorn. Ruth currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. Her pastel paintings are in many important private and corporate collections.

In September 1996, she had her first one- woman show in the United States at Gallery 71 in New York City, which proved to be a huge success. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Metropolitan Home, House & Garden, Elle, Décor and Gourmet Magazine as part of a major ad campaign for Larson-Juhl, the world's largest framing and moulding manufacturer.

In Franklin's hands, pastel painting is restored to it's proper place as a major art medium, suitable for making finished aesthetic statements, as opposed to preliminary drawings or sketches. Indeed, she employs the medium as other painters employ oils, to evoke a rich range of coloristic and atmospheric effects. Her work is particularly remarkable for her use of light, color and line, with which she creates a specific sense of place, even while imbuing her compositions with a unique boldness by virtue of her strong formal generalization. She combines glowing colors and bold outlines to achieve richness and luminosity.

Whether depicting cozy interiors with a warm domestic glow, darkly mysterious suburban streets where identical A- frame houses and lollipop trees hint an ironic social subtext, or the subtle shadow play on the porch of a humble seaside bungalow, Ruth Franklin invests each subject she paints with a visual poetry that implies true mastery.