Zoey Frank

We talked with Zoey Frank  about her art background, her process and her relationship with light. Zoey is an award-winning, Colorado-based painter with a MFA from Laguna College of Art and Design.

The appeal of your paintings, for me, is that they often portray things that I would describe as unremarkable: grocery bags, messy tables, cupboards, etc. The way you paint them is the key. Somehow you find beauty and even magic in the mundane. How did you develop your "eye"?

I’ve found that working from unremarkable motifs has helped me focus on how I’m making the painting, the formal aspects of it, because the subject itself doesn’t carry as much weight. For the painting to be interesting I have to concentrate on the value structure, the color relationships, and the space of the painting. I’ve felt more free to experiment and make changes to the motif in front of me.

At the same time I also like bringing attention and care to these everyday moments—the moments that actually fill our lives. A great deal of time is spent bringing in those grocery bags, putting things in the cupboards and tidying the messy table tops.

How do you decide on what your next painting will be and what is your process like?

One painting leads into the next, I feel like I’m on a path of investigation right now that carries me from project to project. There’s usually something that works in each painting and something that is a real struggle. I’m trying to build on what worked in that previous painting and trying a new solution to what I struggled with.

For example After the Pool  actually started out as two paintings— one was going to be a representational version of the scene and the other was going to be abstract. After over a year of working on them neither painting felt entirely successful. After talking it through with a friend I finally had the idea to combine them into a diptych, bringing abstraction into the representational panel and more form into the abstract one. When I moved fluidly between these different ways of working something really exciting started to happen.

So in my current project, Porch Musicians I planned the painting as a diptych with elements of abstraction and representation moving from panel to panel right from the start. But for this one I’m trying two different viewpoints of the same scene rather than repeating the same image like I did before because I still needed something to be unique about each panel.

I’m also always thinking about other paintings as I’m building my work. For Porch Musicians I was thinking about a diptych by Charles Gill that a collector showed to me a couple of years ago with two viewpoints of an antique car pulled up in a driveway. I liked what happened as I looked back and forth between these two perspectives, taking in a bit more information about the scene, a fuller picture. And I like the idea that there isn’t just one version, one way a scene has to be painted. I’m also thinking about Caravaggio’s musician paintings among others, and the way Cecily Brown moves between representation and abstraction in her paintings.

Your art background is somewhat atypical. Before getting your MFA, you studied with Juliette Aristides at Gage Academy of Art. How did you decide to take that route instead of the more usual university "track"?

At the time when I was looking at colleges I was really interested in traditional painting skills and I was only seeing more conceptual programs at universities. I ended up doing a year and a half of undergrad at a liberal arts college before I dropped out and found Juliette’s atelier which was exactly what I wanted and didn’t know existed.

My interests have expanded since then and it felt really valuable to get an MFA afterwards. I think I would actually enjoy those more conceptual programs now that I have the painting skills as a foundation.

I was showing some of your paintings to a friend just recently: Lemon Tree, Yma and Yma from Behind and his comment was: "How refreshing - an old eye!" By "old eye" he meant figurative painting with obviously excellent technique. Where do you see the place for your art in the contemporary scene which has a rather different flavor? Is that even something that you're concerned with, as an artist that, presumably, needs her own corner of the market?

Those paintings of Yma were from my days in the atelier, when I was learning those traditional skills. My work has gradually become more contemporary since then and the art world has actually become more interested in figurative work, so maybe we are meeting in the middle a little bit? As the shift happened in my work I was thinking less about the art market and more about my own need for the paintings to reflect the world that I live in today. As much as I love the lighting in a Rembrandt painting I live if a world lit by the bright, cool light of florescent bulbs rather than oil lamps. I’ve been navigating my way toward a painting language that reflects how I’m engaged with the world on a daily basis.

I’ve been surprised and grateful that as my work has shifted there has continued to be a market for it.

Even though my friend's observation is something I easily see too, there's not a single one of your paintings that doesn't feel contemporary and fresh. What is your approach to technique and how do you manage to make your art approachable while still maintaining the technical rigor?

In the atelier training I was taught a specific process: a careful drawing, a color study, transferring the drawing to canvas, underpainting, working section by section from back to front of the image, and bringing each area to a finish. I now apply the things I learned about how to organize an image, how to create volume and space etc., but I use an entirely different process and one that shifts from painting to painting.

I’ve been tending to work quite large, finding the image as I go. I start with big shapes and gradually break them down into smaller shapes, making big changes like adding and removing figures, or shifting the whole value structure as the paintings develop. The way I’m laying down opaque patches of paint, my chromatic palette and process of finding my composition feels rooted in Cézanne’s modernism and the folks who came after him as well as the academic painting that I began with.

Tell me about your relationship to light. For me, that seems to be the most conspicuous feature of your paintings. Whatever the subject matter, light is always special.

I’ve always been attracted to paintings that are mainly organized by value. I’ve been exploring color more lately, but the value structure always feels foundational to making the paintings work for me. I’ve also be playing with both capturing the natural light that I’m seeing on the subject and then also imposing my own value organization on top of that—fitting the figures and objects into larger areas of light or dark across the canvas. 

A wonderful example of what I like about your use of light is easily visible in your painting Kitchen (2016). Can you tell us about how this painting came about?

I’ve been thinking about light as a way to direct the viewer’s eye through the image. In many paintings, light is used to spotlight the most important part of the painting––the hero, as it were, but I’ve been playing with the opposite: trying to slow down our eye by using light to misdirect us so that we take in the image over time. In Kitchen the spotlight is on two bags of groceries on the ground in a beam of sunlight, while the figures, which would usually be the focus of the painting, are in the shadows and are held within a narrow value range.

I have to ask about another painting. White Bed (2016). Many of your paintings have an intimate, personal quality to them, but this one seems so grand. It's not a painting, it's a statement. The two figures on it look like tired Greek or Roman statues after their whole day standing shift at the museum. The light adds so much drama. What inspired this painting?

The male figure is actually based off of Perraud’s sculpture Despair.  At the time I was making a series of paintings using sculptures as the basis for some of the characters. The female figure in the painting was based off of a live model. I was interested in the feeling of disconnection between the figures—that they aren’t quite made of the same substance. It was a physical way to convey the psychological drama between them.

What can you tell us about where your art is heading now?

I’ve started a huge 18’x20’ painting with larger than life figures for the first time. I’m really interested in continuing to explore multifigure compositions and the space between representation and abstraction, finding my way towards images that feel more complicated, strange, and in some way also more right than anything that I could have pre-planned. 

The whole idea behind this project is to showcase female artists to people who might otherwise not be acquainted with contemporary art or might have some resistance towards it because it doesn't seem as accessible. Who has influenced your style and are there any young artists out there that you admire and that you feel deserve more recognition?

I’m inspired by so many contemporary painters right now! To name a few that I’ve looked up to: Ann Gale, Susan Lichtman, Catherine Kehoe, Susan Jane Walp, Louis Dodd, Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville, Njideka Crosby, and Jennifer Bartlett. A few younger folks that I’m really enjoying right now are Stephanie Pierce, Celeste Rapone, Kimberly Trowbridge, Colleen Barry, and Dianna Settles.

You can see more of Zoey’s work here.