"The Myth of Frankenstein" at Frank Pictures Gallery

Written by Roxanne Palermo Friday, 06 May 2011 21:26

 

Santa Monica, CA - Each one of Patricia Terrell O'Neal's paintings was inspired by her subconscious reaction to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  The project began at O'Neal's French residence, the castle, Chateau St. Philippe,  in Savoie, France, a few miles from a similar chateau high in the Alps where Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, age 19, and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron  at the Villa Diodati. There they challenged one another to each compose a story of their own, the contest being won by whoever wrote the scariest tale. Mary conceived an idea after she fell into a waking dream or nightmare during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
 

"I was moved that Mary Shelley at age nineteen could give birth to an icon, a brokenhearted motherless monster, born from the pain caused by the death of Dr. Frankenstein's mother.", says Terrell O'Neal, "These paintings accentuate the psychological situations of captured moments  dealing with mob mentality, the murder of innocents, the latent eroticism of the monster, guilt, intellect and the perception of self. My paintings are influenced by early film and visionary in scale and powerful in their expression of the basic nature of the human soul. They portend the world they were created in, the history of the region, monumentality of the landscape and the mysterious evocative power of the French Alps."  

Laurie Frank says of the work, "I was struck dumb when I first saw The Myth of Frankenstein. For me, these paintings did what great art should always do, shocked me into a recognition of a dazzling pain so pure as to become exquisite. Painting nowadays is not supposed to be plainly narrative, but I experienced this body of work as a gorgeous abstraction, not of image but of emotion, a geometry not of  text, but of subtext. They reminded me of Goya. These paintings let me hear the lonely howl of these monsters, the creator and  the created with his exploded soul, and  to really see what is most buried and hidden, not in them, but in me."

On exhibition February 16 - March 20, 2008  Visit :  http://FrankPicturesGallery.com

Frank Pictures Gallery - Bergamot Station A-5 - 2525 Michigan Ave - Santa Monica, CA 90404 - 310-828-0211 phone

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