Contemporary Artists | Period Artists (A-H) | Period Artists (H-Z)

Lillia Frantin

Victory of the Flowers Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

With their immediacy and nearly spiritual intensity, Lillia Frantin's works link to the Modernism of Van Gogh, Matisse and Bonnard, that places emotional response at the center of art.  And at the center of her art is color, vital color. Lillia invites us to see the world anew through her work. She has created an art that is distinctly recognizable and completely her own.  Revealing the “life-force” in all natural things, she presents flowers, fruit, fish, seaside views, her garden, her own studio, the energy that comes from the light on sand and sea.  Each painted brushstroke is charged and dynamic. Each shape and form, almost vibrating with physicality and presence.  Everything filled with potential and possibility.  Fauvism lives again in her art.  With this painter, life is for the living and is to be savored.

From an early age, Lillia found expression through drawing and painting although she found the power of color only after studying Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse.  It was in undergraduate studio work that she began testing the limits of representation through still life, her first and enduring life theme.

This was during the 1960’s while Abstract Expressionists and Pop Artists like Rauschenberg, Rivers and deKooning were creating sensational avant-garde works.  The power of their free expression acted like a tonic on the young artist.  From her initial experience in the studio she realized she could break away from the limitations of “realism” and still maintain the simple pleasure of seeing, feeling and responding to things around her that she loved.  Painting became invention and discovery.  She began experimenting with a personal language based on color, paint, open areas of unpainted canvas and bold drawings and perspectives.  These vibrant neo-Fauvist canvases are unrestrained celebrations of the way light turns into color, and then turns back. Uninhibited by formal constraints, Lillia puts the paint on the canvas as an honest and direct response to the scene before her, painting in a language that is truly her own.

Frantin received her Masters degree from the Pratt Institute, NY and was a professor of painting and modern art history for over twenty years.  Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including Palm Springs, Santa Fe, Palm Beach, Washington DC, New York , Nantucket as well as Barcelona, Provence and Brittany. 

In December of 2006, Lillia was given a very prestigeous solo exhibition of New Paintings at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA. Her work is now included in their permanent collection. 
                       
For Lillia, each painting has a meaning beyond the label “still life” or “landscape”.  She explains, “…art is really what we all search for in life: understanding and respect, harmony and freedom, connection, vitality, truth and beauty.”