Nancy B. Frank is a long time resident of Telluride, Colorado, where she can be heard to say, "I don't have a career, I have a lifestyle."
Nancy B. Frank, photographer and painter, is a former Wisconsinite with substantial training: a B.F.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in photo-printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, plus numerous art-fellowships including the MacDowell Colony, a year’s study in Rome, Italy, and five years as Adjunct Instructor teaching serigraphy at New York University. Frank has worked successfully in mediums as varied as painted wooden jewelry, sculptured cakes, painted furniture, faux decorative painting, and photography, while consistently working as a fine art painter.
"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.
I collect these photographs from 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.
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.
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." – Nancy B. Frank
MUSEUM AFFILIATIONS
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Baltimore Museum of Art
St Louis Art Museum
American Museum of the Moving Image
Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA
