Fanchon Frohlich

(1927-2016)

 Born Fanchon Angst in Waterloo, Iowa, U.S.A., she won a number of national scholarships and chose to attend the University of Chicago, an experimental University, studying philosophy of science with Professor Rudolph Carnap, founding member of the Vienna Circle, and the process philosophy of Whitehead.

In 1949 came to Somerville College, Oxford, where she was occupied in post – Wittgenstein linguistic philosophy with Professor Sir Peter Strawson, (1949-1953), and on “Primary and Secondary Qualities”, parts of her thesis being published in “Mind”.

Married Professor Herbert Frohlich, FRS, a Theoretical Physicist who did pure research in Liverpool and later on quantum physics applied to the understanding of biology in the Max Planck Institute for Solid Body Research in Stuttgart, Germany and in La Holla, California, USA.

Had participated as philosopher of science, along with Herbert, every two years in a conference on “From Quantum Mechanics to Biology” at the I’lnstitut de la Vie in Versailles where leading physicists and biologists communicated leading to new ideas which would not have developed from their individual disciplines – from 1967 to 1988.

Began painting under the name of Frohlich studying at the Liverpool College of Art [post-graduate] with the painter Peter Lanyon, in Cornwall, with Goto San in Kyoto and etching with Stanley William Hayter in Paris. (Hayter formed a centre of interconnection between art, poetry [having himself illustrated works of Apolinaire Eluard and Samuel Becket among others] and physics and chemistry [having been himself a chemist] intermittently during twenty years until his death.

Has published many articles on philosophy of science and art, and their interconnections. Has written a book with Sylvie Le Seac’h on « S. W. Hayter’s Research On Experimental Drawing », and found in the course of the writing, that they developed a new form of collaboration embodying many of Hayter’s methods.

In 1991, founded ‘Collective Phenomena’, a group of painters collaborating on a single surface, one continuing or contradicting the lines of the other according to the visual counterpoint, sometimes with the composer Lawrence Ball, who improvises on their movements.

 

 

Painting

First period:         

Oil colour with canvas with Damar Varnish. Dynamic movement transversing the canvas in diagonals – either pushing to sliding along – rising with or against the energy contained in the picture plane [See “Left – Right Asymmetry in Picture Space”] like the forces pervading a physical field.

Interruption to study Biology.

Second period:

Oil Colours on Canvas: from 1986. Painting in definite separate areas of strong colour squarish but somewhat interpenetrating, doing canvases employing interactions among colours and with using their psychological dimension.

 

Third period:         

After 1991. Mixed media on paper. Integrating into painting fragments of poetry, dreams, written physics, transparent portraits done by me in the past, partially obliterated partially still evident. Realising that this lost the dynamic trust present in the first period, regretting this – how to integrate the Dynamic diagonals with brilliant colour? In etching, this integration had been realised because they were done in two stages – energetic brushwork and arising out of this, the colour.   How to bring these two contrary elements into cohesion?

Fourth period: In 1991 founded “Collective Phenomena” with several Returning painters working abstractly together on the same surface with music by Lawrence Ball, live or recorded. Exhibited this group activity in Paris, Liverpool and in London with Lawrence accompanying us according to our movements. The group has exhibited with colleagues in “Collective Phenomena” in Paris [under the auspices of the publisher John Calder] and in Liverpool – with both a performance and an exhibition.

Fifth period: Returned to individual work as well as collective.

 

 

Publications: numerous among which is Published in the British Journal of Aesthetics:

« Right-Left Asymmetries In Picture Space »

« Paradoxes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art»

« Locations Of Light In Art» Published by Springer Verlay – Berlin and Heidelberg:

« Genetic Code as Language », 1986

« Life as a Collective Phenomena » for Co-operative Phenomena, 1984 Published by Elanger Press N.J., with Gerald Hyland:

« Coherence In Mind-Brain Interface », 1994 Published by Creative Mind:

« The Alchemical Dynamics of Collective Phenomena », 1995

Stanley Willian Hayter’s Research on Experimental Drawing: Systems of oscillating perceptual fields, conscious and unconscious dialogue by Fanchon Frohlich and Sylvie Le Seac’h               online at:  http://www.stanleywilliamhayter.com/

 

Conferences – too numerous to mention: most recently

« Conscious and Unconscious Dialogue » for the Arizona conference on

«Consciousness» , 1996.

Previously in International Society of Aesthetics, Amsterdam, (Finland), Warsaw etc.

Now continuing with ‘Collective Phenomena’ in both senses – philosophic and artistic.