painters work on paper
Artist Statement
Frances Hamilton
Frances Hamilton is a painter and collage artist whose work has been exhibited widely in New England for over 25 years. Her images are intimate, rich in color and often inspired by memory and dream.
The Squam Lake Series is based on a lifetime of visits to a friend's summer home near Center Harbor, New Hampshire. In this series "All Around the House," the artist travels from kitchen to bedrooms to porches, patterned in sunlight and always suggesting the nearness of water, the sound of the waves. Accompanying this exhibit is a color catalogue and essay by University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth curator Lasse Antonsen.
What might seem most familiar here is the sense of place, family and traditions created through the journeys back to a summer home. The overlay of time, spiritual regeneration, birth and death are all implied in the visible evidence of simple wooden tables and fishing gear, the play of light coming through flowered curtains. There is a paradoxically unchanged experience in the effects of many changing lives returning to a familiar and beloved setting. Squam Lake is renowned for families that have protected this culture of respectful return and the home which is fondly painted by the artist is one of many such shared campsites where the cultural archeology of past and present offers rich material for contemplation.