Book Review: august. Susie Orbach, Frances Aviva Blane (2022, Starmount Publishing)

I have Frances Aviva Blane’s latest book by my side. It’s a gorgeous 12” x 12” inch object – like a vinyl album. I have Charles Mingus’s 1974 live recording at Carnegie Hall playing while writing this. Like food and wine, both complement each other, the intensity in jazz and Frances’ 16 untitled works on paper of human heads spilling colour and shade - or are the colour and shade spilling into the heads? It’s up to you…Frances places little control over how her viewer experiences or reads the work; no titles, no explanation, only scale and material. The book title tells us the month and the opening essay by the renowned British psychoanalyst and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978), Susie Orbach (who was Diana, Princess of Wales’ therapist back in the 1990s) offers her insight as to what the artworks mean to her. We can either take or leave her impressions, interpretations or readings of Frances’ work, but as a therapist Orbach offers some meaning to us, the reader/viewer.

“Frances’ heads generate questions about the head and about the self” (Susie Orbach)

For those unfamiliar with Frances’ work, human heads and self-portraits are an obsessive feature in her paintings and drawings, they are abstract and figurative in the loosest sense of the word.

Untitled 17. charcoal/acrylic/bockingford. 42x29.7 cms

August 2022, London…the city was burning, the hottest heatwave on record. For Frances, August distilled mental, visceral yet stoic pain, a moment of brain spills. The drawings are uncomfortable to look at. Furious thick black charcoal marks a bludgeoned purply-red graped coloured head in Untitled 17, the colour of blood with the oxygen sucked out of the cells as it decomposes in the heat.

Untitled 11. charcoal, acrylic, bockingford. 38x29cms

Untitled 11 is a head that looks frozen, an empty apparitional mutated face half-human half something else. The thick white acrylic shapes a face, lips and eyes are again charcoal black, unsmiling, blank. The hint of summer could be seen, but on close inspection the blues are polar cool, icy. There is no joy here.

My favourite, Untitled 14 is a largely black head with dark blue tones underneath the charcoal, it’s hot and dark, a companion to Untitled 11, both are menacing. The lips are burnt orange, the backdrop is a wash of rusty red, caramel brown, burnt ochre. It feels stifling and claustrophobic.

Untitled 14. charcoal, acrylic, bockingford. 38x29 cms

What is going on in Frances’ head? For her, colour is not used to seduce with sensuality, but to push us into an uneasy troubled space, a dark passion of strength and vulnerability. Some of the other pieces featured are more sparse, the white of the bockingford or waterford paper are flecked with marks, stains and rubbed out tints.

Susie Orbach’s accompanying text is titled A Thesaurus of Heads. She writes that “Frances’ aesthetic is flooded with affect…She enables us to see and when we can dare to hold the gaze we read aspects of the human condition which lie outside the polite.”

August evoked not warmth, pleasure, love and joy for Frances. Perhaps it’s the Russian war on Ukraine, the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the heatwave, droughts and wildfires, the cost of living crisis…we can only surmise what provoked this series of works.

Frances’ heads bring to mind the other famous painter of heads, that other Francis…he was male, deeply anguished, he responded to and felt the pain and horror, the aftermath of World War 2…

We need this kind of work, not referential but tapping into a deep, visceral feeling…unlike Francis Bacon’s work, Frances isn’t screaming she’s feeling bludgeoned, she, or rather her heads stare at us with expressionless suffering.

august. is available at Waterstones. The full pdf can be downloaded here. Visit Frances Aviva Blane's website for more information, past and forthcoming exhibitions.

Dr. Susie Orbach is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist with a practice seeing individuals, couples and also a consultant to organisations. She co-founded The Women’s Therapy Centre in London in 1976 and The Women’s Therapy Center Institute in New York City in 1981. She is a social commentator, political activist and the author of 15 books.

Manick Govinda

Brain Spill