Artist Mini Interview: Nancy B Frank
What does “being an artist” mean to you today?
Responsibility.
What influences outside of art shape your practice?
My travels and photo workshops, often in National Parks, where I am drawn to finding beauty in the details. Rocks, wood, grasses, water, sand, metal fill my frame.
What is your favorite quote or saying?
“Art releases its power whenever a viewer becomes a dreamer”. Larry Bell, artist
What is your secret talent?
Inspiration.
What part of the creative process do you enjoy the most—and which part challenges you?
The camera is a great tool for teaching how one personally “sees”. For me the joy of photography is just that. Composing inside the viewfinder gives me insight as to how I like to see the world. Using a systematic approach to composition through elimination, I train my eye to see patterns in everyday texture and subtleties that are often overlooked. I like to fill my frame completely.
Each painting emerges from a close study of my own photographs, yet the process remains fluid. My interest seems to exist at the intersection where realism meets abstraction while capturing the intricacies of structures and colors in nature.
What does art allow you to say that words cannot?
Rather than trying to impose a singular interpretation, I hope the viewer engages with the work on their own terms. Although each painting and eventual series emerges from a photograph, what begins as observation progresses from intuition and instinct. Sometimes things appear on the canvas that come from memory, which always astonishes me, how visual experience is stored in the unconscious.
My aim is to reveal both the tangible and the intangible, because, for me, Magic is what you cannot see.
What are you excited about exploring next, creatively or personally?
After a successful 11 years devoted to an equine painting series, which included a self published book of those works entitled “Up Close and Personal”, it was time to move, to progress, to evolve and to play with new mediums and techniques. I was looking for a new identity and a more abstract way to express myself.
I’ve stretched my range of techniques to include oil cold wax and acrylic cold wax which enable transparencies, extended dry times, glazes, layering, scoring and reduction, over a preparation of textural build up by using various gel mediums. Metallic paints and faux techniques along with oil pastels are also employed.
What are you currently working on?
I'm working on a new series entitled EARTH GEMS for an exhibition next summer.
