NEW YORK, NY.- An exhibition of recent expressionist paintings by Frances Hynes, an artist with a strong affinity for a wooded landscape and a rugged seacoast, will open at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on Friday, March 8. The exhibition, entitled Light of Form, will remain on view through April 9.

Hynes works from the pleasant memories she carries of sojourns in the farm country of Upstate New York or rural New England or along the coast of Maine. She aims to convey the feel of a place, rather than the actual look of it. The line she draws between abstraction and representation blurs in response to changes in light and weather as they play off the foliage of the woods or the tossing waves of the ocean.

Hynes seems to revel in immersing herself in nature, conveying her landscapes and seascapes with lush layers of dense gray, blue greens, ochre, black and pale green that imply movement, space, form, light and the inevitable passage of time. The apparent spontaneity and lightness of her brushstrokes, which she carries to the edges of her canvas, imply an infinite continuity of her imagery.

Her work celebrates the rhythm of nature, whether through abstract clouds dancing above a quiet land or ocean waters or seemingly insignificant figures moving within an underlying subtly suggested architectural format of grid lines, a continuing reference to her earlier paintings.

“Hynes’s skillful working of the brush is on a par with her mastery of color,” writes critic Edward Leffingwell of Art in America in a review of her 2009 exhibition at the June Kelly Gallery, “and both are placed in service to the medium of memory.”

Hynes, who lives and works in New York, received a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University and a master’s degree from New York University. She also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York.

Hynes has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. She is represented in many public and corporate collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Newark Museum; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Queens Museum of Art; The National Museum of Women in the Arts; Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; Brooklyn Union Gas and Alliance Capital Management.