Frances grew up on Fenland at the edge of The Wash. Its black earth and Siberian winds shaped the fundamentals of her practice. Plein air painting offered a means to respond to experiences that were marvellous to her in her solitary meanderings – mundane miracles that stopped her in her tracks, literally, and still do.

She continues to seek out time ‘in nature’, preferring to work under the bowl of sky rather than the confinement of a roof. Nowadays, her way of being with the land is multi-sensory and whole-bodied – hands-on and messy.

 
The Jurassic Coast lies within easy reach of Frances’ Portland studio. Its varied geology provides earths that become her pigments. The paintings weave together earths indigenous to each place, with traces of weather, season, and tide as they present with gouache, acrylic, or watercolour paint.

Frances completed her Foundation year in Cambridge. She went on to study French and Visual Art at Aberystwyth University College of Wales. Her year abroad was spent as Auditrice Libre at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Nantes. From that point she committed to a creative pathway with an apprenticeship at The World’s End Press in Wapping and a postgraduate year at Goldsmiths’ College in art teacher training. After several years as Head of History of Art and Art at North Foreland Lodge in Hampshire, she renewed her commitment to her own practice by returning as a mature student to Wimbledon College of Art for a Postgraduate MA Printmaking.

Frances was a senior tutor and associate lecturer at West Dean College between 1989 and 2022. Teaching has been a richly rewarding seam throughout her career. She recently relinquished her work as art educator to make space for her curiosity to deepen further into her own practice.

In 2005 she published her first book, Drawn to Antarctica. She continues to write about her projects and collaborations in various publications. Her work features in books including Drawing and Painting: Materials and Techniques for Contemporary Artists published by Thames and Hudson.  

Frances has exhibited widely throughout the UK including repeatedly in highly regarded competitive London group exhibitions including the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, the Works on Paper Fair, The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours (RI), the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. In 2016, Frances was awarded the Shenzhen International Watercolour Biennial Prize at the RI exhibition at the Mall Galleries. This is ‘an award to encourage innovation and experimentation in contemporary water-media.’

In 2020 she curated a show of her paintings with ceramics by world-class potters entitled The Common Ground at the Crafts Study Centre, University College for the Arts, Farnham. She was elected Associate to the Royal Watercolour Society in 2022 (ARWS). In 2024 she co-curated a four-woman exhibition at The Royal Watercolour Society Gallery in London. Frances has shown regularly and has been represented by Sladers Yard since 2015.