Unlikely Passions: Linda Franklin, Portrait of the Artist

Linda Franklin: Portrait of the Artist

Linda Franklin lives an unusually calm conventional life for an artist who admits “the possession of paint and the ongoing battle with the surface of a canvas can only one day break me in half”.
On first glance you would never suspect this pretty, 52 year old house wife to be the artist behind such dramatic and daring art work. Like many women Linda’s artistic career came later. In many ways she has lived most of her life before at last she took the plunge and ‘grappled’ with paint. Here she allows us to venture into her rather contrast of worlds.

Why did you wait so long to get so involved in art?
It was really difficult to pursue art when I was younger. My parents really wanted me to have a ‘proper job’. I left school and went to university to study speech therapy, but I failed on science so had to leave and became a PA, but I didn’t have all the basic skills so it was going no where for me. I eventually decided to join the army as an officer. I think I just needed to earn some money and it seemed a secure way of supporting my self, and it was the proper career that parents wanted for me. It was there I met my husband and that was the last time I did a proper job. I had children which took up a lot of my life and only in the last ten years have I had any time to really paint!


Where did you artistic streak come from?
Neither of my parents ever painted but my mother was very literary. She read me Milton’s Paradise Lost when I was very young. I didn’t understand it at all but enjoyed the drama of all those marvellous words, even without understanding its true meaning it was amazingly exciting. Milton’s work still has a big influence over my portraits in particular. The characters always end up showing desperation, whether through pain or thought or angst.

You say they ‘end up’ like this, is this therefore something that you are unaware of at the beginning of a painting?
I don’t set out to do something in particular, although I might have a mood or a feeling associated with the subject or person that I am portraying I don’t ever know what it’s going to look like when the paint stops being reapplied. It really is more about the process than anything else, that process being the laying of the paint or charcoal and then the destruction of a line and the rebuilding or shape and density. Its all very unpredictable.

You talk a lot about the process of a painting or drawing, does this mean you have a particular feeling towards a finished piece, perhaps a feeling of satisfaction that something has become finished and is unchangeable?
No, it is quite the opposite. I have no feeling toward most of my finished pieces, that doesn’t mean I dislike them but I am finished with them. Although you stand back and look analytically at them to see where they came from and why they work or not work as a painting, I never feel satisfaction it is more like relief, although not quite relief either. I just see them as the result of the painting rather than the finished article. I don’t see a piece of art as a complete whole; it really is a piece, a segment of the entire development, it makes it no more important just because it is the final development. A finished piece of work is what is left over after the artist has finished with it, the remains of a battle with the canvas.


What in your life influences your work?
I see moods through dramatic expressions rather than through actual feeling. Although I have done some work that has been influenced by my own raw emotions, its impossible not to. When my husband was very ill and I thought I might lose him the portraits that came from those feelings are very powerful. But, of course, it is not until afterwards that you realise it was that which went into a painting. Only on hindsight you can see the exact push of an emotion. Pollack and Munch’s art was about process and only later they realised exactly what process it was they were grappling with, I identify with that.


How does your life fit in with your art? You say you have children, what are you first, an artist or a mother?
I am a mother first. But I am not a mother who paints. My children and my art are very separate. When I am in my studio and my children are with me, they are my friends, when I am back in the house I am mummy. This is the only way it works for me. Ultimately, to be a good artist I believe you have to be very selfish, so I have to separate the two otherwise one side would lose out. But my children are much older now and so tend to be a good judge of my work and are very critical, which is good because they know I’ll listen!


Linda Franklin is currently exhibiting in the Chanley Gallery in Chelsea and the Lansdowne Club in Green Park. Linda lives and works in Wiltshire with her husband and their yellow Labrador, Hector.
You can contact her about her art at lindaafranklin@btinternet.com