Frances Thwaites

Frances Thwaites was born Musselburgh but raised in India until her return to St Serf’s boarding school in Edinburgh at 10. After which she enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art to work for a Diploma in Stained Glass and a scholarship took her to Paris.

She shares much with other Scottish women artists, like Bet Low and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who also found their stimulus in landscape, not so much in the actual forms which the mind assimilates through the eye, but rather the mood which a given environment can call up at certain moments of heightened experience.

What makes her work notable and, at best, memorable, is the extent to which she used that freedom; her ability to crystallise in line and tone and subdued, subtle colours her own heightened perceptions, to communicate her sense of hidden meanings in nature-movements, relationships, cross-rhythms, energy in control. Her work is a slow, continuing consistent development sure of its direction and therefore undeviating, whatever the temptations. Her subject is sensation, rather than pure vision – oceans in all aspects, wind, sail silent speed of high-pitched, rarified air. Lines slant or stream like vapour trails across grey washes or floodings of colour full of climatic suggestions. Cordelia Oliver, July 1990

Frances Thwaites exhibited in many Edinburgh and London group exhibitions, and held several solo exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery in 1950, 1955, 1957, 1960, 1968 and a Memorial in 1990. Other notable exhibitions include Galeria Latina, Palma de Mallorca 1972, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge 1973, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 1974, The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney 1986.