Francine Van Hove is a contemporary French painter. Born in 1942 in Saint-Mandé (Seine, France), she studied in Paris and received a Fine Arts degree with qualifications to teach in secondary schools. After teaching one year at Lycee de Jeunes Filles in Strasbourg, she resigned from her position and decided to come back to Paris in 1964 where she now lives and continues to paint. She is known for her paintings of young women with dreaming attitudes. Her graphic and pictorial techniques are reminiscent of Italian Renaissance painters and Flemish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. Her work now counts more than 400 paintings, all privately owned, as well as numerous drawings and pastels. "The remote world portrayed by Van Hove is peopled by nude young women. The lighting which exposes them is of a precise quality which makes their reality veer slightly, almost imperceptibly, away from everyday reality. Her figures strike up very natural poses which make us feel the existence of a precarious yet exquisite dividing-line between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Her figures (she paints from 'live' models) define certain canons of beauty. This aptitude is characteristic of an innate sense of stylisation which has always been felt as necessary by painters who tend to paint timeless subjects. Van Hove's art possesses the essential quality of suggesting without proselytising. It abolishes the distance between emotions and their perception. The subtlest feelings, the most tenuous allusions she has set down come across to us in a startlingly precise fashion. And the vibration in that transmission is pure pleasure." http://www.francinevanhove.com/ undefined

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