Biography
Anne Franklin (née Tessa) was born in 1918 in east London. She was educated at the Robert Montefiore School in Valence Road, London. As a child she was always interested in reading, poetry and fairies. Aged 10 she composed a number of poems that were later published in a booklet, “Let’s Pretend”.She left school when she was 14, and went to work in the packing department of the Best Dart Virginia tobacco company in Wareham, earning just 15 shillings a week. Later she joined the WRNS, serving first as a stewardess in Portsmouth, and later as a Marine Wren at Eastney Barracks, Portsmouth.
After the war, Anne did a training in nursing and worked in a home for the elderly and infirm in Clapton, North London. She later met her husband, Richard, and they married in September 1949 – this year will be their 58th anniversary. After a further period of time in nursing, Anne took a clerical job in local government in Portsmouth before moves to London, and eventually Reading where she and Richard have lived for the past 30 years. Throughout this period, up to 1975, she says she had no interest in art at all, and had never tried doing any drawing or painting.
Anne’s mother had a measure of psychic perception which Anne seems to have inherited, and three months after Anne’s mother died in 1975, Anne heard an “inner voice” urging her draw. However, Anne’s initial response was “Rubbish – I can’t draw”. Nevertheless, she did tentatively try doing some “scribblings” as she called them, and later found that as she developed a passion for music, especially Handel and Mozart, she felt inspired to sketch and paint. Soon her technique improved, (she has never had any tuition), and she found that under the inspiration of music she was painting mostly portraits of people she had never met, but which were occasionally recognised by other people.
In one particularly dramatic incident she not only made a sketch of someone she’d never met but who was recognised by the person next to her as being a member of the cast of a play that was currently in production at RADA, but as she sketched she was also humming a tune she’d never heard before by Alistair Skinner. There is no doubt that Anne’s psychic gifts are very much in evidence in her pictures.
Since 1975, under the inspiration of music, she has produced pictures prolifically, some in acrylic paints, but mostly in pastels with an astonishing variety of portraits and some abstracts, as you can see from the gallery on this website.
Although Anne has been afflicted with progressive blindness in the past 3 years, she continues to do the occasional portrait – “blind art” as she calls it, whose stark simplicity still speak of secrets unshared.
Anne Franklin’s work has been shown in many exhibitions, including 3 in Henley, 3 in The Hexagon in Reading, 2 at Somerfield College, Oxford, with invitation to exhibit in Portsmouth and Windsor.