This week I finished sorting all of the slides for the Thorley/Françoise collection in which I found things I did not expect. Annette had carefully and painstakingly catalogued many of her works and thus I was not surprised to see many shots of the angular manicured features of her pieces. However, I was stunned when I came across slides from Annette’s time in undergrad, complete with shots of her early work in Long Beach dating all the way back to 1964! In previous posts I mentioned her initial interest in sculpture, below you can find a carefully crafted juxtaposition between sunny 1960’s Long Beach and one of Françoise’s early pieces, an ash toned abstract sculpture seemingly approximating the female figure. I lived in Long Beach for nearly three years and to me these pictures appear to have been taken near the Long Beach marina or on the southern end of Belmont Shore. My time living in Long Beach impressed upon me the vitality of the city itself, I find solace in the memories of an entirely unpretentious and unique enclave of Los Angeles County where the southern west coast meets the Pacific Ocean. The gravitas of Annette’s sculpture pictured below is somehow the perfect complement to such a backdrop.
Similarly, Annette had a few slides collections that didn’t necessarily contain her artwork (and instead contained snapshots of personal trips), yet still retained her artistic spin. In these collections I found slides from a trip Annette took to Spain in 1971, Palmer Canyon in 1966 as well as a collection titled “Near Istanbul” (presumably Turkey) with slide dates suggesting they were taken in October of 1973. To see such places through Annette’s eyes transported me to both the time and place and created a sense of nostalgia for things I had never experienced. This speaks to Françoise’s framing ability and how she rarely captured scenes and instead opted to capture experiences and impressions. In some of her last slides I found paintings she created for a Scarborough gallery on display in 1969. You can’t quite make out the expression of the onlookers, but if I had to guess I imagine they were rightly enthralled.
Françoise’s pencil illustrations 
Annette’s paintings on display in a Scarborough gallery, 1969
