“Good art can always enliven a space,” says Geraldine Franklin, “ But the best art can change the temperature in the room.”

Franklin’s oil paintings, screen prints and ceramics can certainly give the mercury pause for thought. Her hot colours- inspired equally by the brio of Matisse and the saturated hues of Patrick Heron and the St Ives school- combine with the coolly appraising eye that sees her shift easily between figuration and abstraction, flatness and depth, and larger and smaller scales. “ I’ve got something contrary in me, where I want to try out oppositions in the same work, “ she says. “ I was quite inhibited as a child, so when I discovered the world of play and terrific freedom, I didn’t want anything else in my life. My thing is to just let go a little, see where the work takes me, and not be too safe and controlled.”

Franklin earned a first-class honours degree in art and design from North Staffordshire Polytechnic in Stoke-on-Trent, but it was the decades she spent working as an art psychotherapist having obtained her post graduate diploma from Goldsmiths’, where she went on to work as a private practitioner working in schools, hospitals a prison that had a profound impact on her own work. “ It was intuitive, untutored stuff, pure expression really,” she says. “ It reminded me of that Picasso quote about how he was able to  paint like Raphael in four years but how it took him a lifetime to paint like a child.I lost interest in the more obviously formal, schooled, polite way of doing things. I admire people like Rose Wylie and Roger Hilton, whose work has a very spontaneous childlike quality.”

Franklin’s own diverse body of work is animated by a similarly skittish sensibility, whether it’s a jewel-like study of a winter landscape or a big bold acrylic painting of a set of stacked chairs, ( she relishes the challenge of working on a grand scale: “I don’t like small, I contrived twee stuff she says. “A larger format encourages more risk-taking; the stakes are higher.”) If there are themes running through the work, she says one of them would be windows: “ Both literally, as I like to paint apertures that look out onto another world, and figuratively, as I think everything that is going on in your life is reflected in your work, which is terrifically powerful and interesting. “ Another might be process: “ In my paintings and screen prints I’m interested in layering, stumbling and tearing, so the motif I started with- a bottle or bicycle or whatever it is- might be transformed, or even vanished altogether as I go. “

In the end, she says, the work’s appeal- and its thermometer-challenging qualities- rests not only in its vividness, audacity, or hard-won wisdom : “ It’s also that I’ve made myself very vulnerable, and put my deepest feelings on display. That’s what people respond to, “ and echoing Picasso, she says there’s always more to unlearn. “ With every piece I embark on, I always feel like I am starting from scratch. Here we go again, on the high-wire act,” she laughs. “ But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Stuart Husband