Ruth Franklin

By Ed McCormack Editor-in-Chief, Artspeak, New York City:

... Franklin’s pictures are so richly accomplished that they can be favorably compared to a diverse range of past masters, from Chardin to Georges Rouault. However, her images are ultimately unique and distinguished by the inimitable stylistic stamp of her own sure hand. She is an important contemporary artist with a unique vision.

… 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 generalizations. Few painters of her generation, on either side of the Atlantic, have evolved such a distinct personal style.

… Despite her relative youth, Franklin's work has a sense of mature resolution of vision reminiscent of masters as diverse as Georges Rouault and her fellow countryman Howard Hodgkin. She is also akin to that great French painter in the spiritual suggestiveness that infuses her compositions. All the more remarkably, however, she brings the spiritual dimension into her work without sullying the purity of her vision through the inclusion of hackneyed religious symbolism.

Ruth Franklin invests each subject she paints with a visual poetry that implies true mastery.