Frank Humphrey Allen

The sun comes out from behind a cloud. Curtains stir in a window. A shadow crosses a room. For a fleeting moment, ordinary things appear extraordinary, as if touched by something mystical. English Artist Frank Humphrey Allen captures just such a numinous moment in his gouache painting, In the Studio. The edge of a gilded frame, a curled piece of paper, and a cartoon-like drawing, pinned on a wall, lead you to believe this is the interior of an artist’s studio with two painted panels on display. But is this illusion of space any more “real” than what you see in the first canvas with its drawn red curtain and jutting table of art supplies or in the partly hidden picture behind it with the oddly angled aquarium? What do you make of the angel in the painting within the first painting, propped up against an easel (could it be a cross?) or the trinity of gold fish, swimming in the panel behind this double-image? Allen teases out levels of meaning through tricks of perspective and pictures within pictures, until we suddenly find ourselves in what the Celtic mystics call a “thin place,” where the dividing line between this world and the next seems to blur and time stands still.