ZOEY FRANK | Yard

“These drawings and paintings are set in the backyard. I’m interested in exploring time in my work, tracking a space as it changes: over the course of the day, through different seasons. Different states of the yard are explored here, from the stark, empty space in the bright light of a Colorado winter, to a lush high summer picnic.

It’s also important to me that these images emerge over time. For the drawings, I started in a sketchbook on a single sheet of paper, making a small drawing from observation of a small section of the yard in front of me. I then added to the image one piece of paper at a time, eventually taping the sheets together and then mounting them so I could finish the picture as a single composition.

I liked how approachable it felt to just start a little drawing on a little piece of paper––and then the challenge of finding a larger image as all the sheets of paper came together. And I liked the starkness of drawing bare tree limbs in these winter yard scenes with just graphite on paper. They’re very simple in that way.

The multi-panel paintings began similarly, working from observation in my yard for ‘Back Garden’ and in the yard behind my studio in ‘Haley’s Yard.’ I began with one panel, with the idea that it would grow, and just started painting. For ‘Back Garden’ I used a different limited palette for each panel, and the color blocks on the edges show the three-four paints that I used for each panel, and then a few mixes to see what the palette could achieve in the rows next to that.

Using a different palette in each panel helped make it feel to me like the scene is unfolding over time rather than all at once. I also like how the color squares move my eye around and keeps me coming back to the surface of the image.

‘Haley’s Yard’ has a few color blocks in the sky because those panels were borrowed from ‘Back Garden’—as I was finding that composition in the painting was a little larger along the right side at one point. For Haley’s Yard I worked from observation on the four main panels, and the painting was straightforward for a few years. I came back to it after a long break and added the figures and the dog, the yellow sky and the extra panels above and below, making a composition that isn’t contained within a rectangle for the first time. All these changes made the painting come alive for me.

For ‘Picnic #1’ I used an expanded palette, represented in the color blocks, which in this case become almost like digital glitches in the picture. The greater degree of abstraction in this painting makes it feel to me like this perfect summer moment of family gathering together is flickering in and out of existence. Like a memory or something hoped for that isn’t quite solid.”

- Zoey Frank

In her first Robischon Gallery exhibition, Colorado artist Zoey Frank brings her signature mark to both painted and drawn figural/landscape subject matter in a variety of approaches and scale. As a fusion of meticulous and gestural painted brushwork along with small, vivid color-block grids, the artist’s unfolding narrative of lively, intimate gatherings shift and re-form as if harnessing the convivial energy of a group at leisure, dining or gardening. The casual couple laboring over raised beds in Back Garden are made monumental, heroic even, in the large painting where the simple pleasure of the mundane tending of homegrown vegetables is suffused with green, the color of growth. While welcoming shade approaches, the bright orange hue of the gardener’s shirt is in lively chromatic dialogue. While the narrative may serve as a balm and Frank’s clear understanding of her materials is grounded in tradition, her painterly abstract language is contemporary, activated by the geometry of pixels in the grid forms; a conceit that in actuality reveals her chosen palette.

Additionally for her drawings, the finely rendered, graphite mark-making delicately defines humble backyard views of picnic tables and compost bins with fluid and ethereal grace. An insistent branch forces its way through fence pickets in the foreground of the drawing entitled The View into Natalie’s Yard while the artist offers the same precise, beckoning attention to the further rooftops of the neighborhood. Frank’s process for both series amalgamates joined paper, canvas, or panel substrates, which for the artist suggests both spatial and temporal shift as the different hues and angles animate her compositions. The diverse individual elements are energized in their contrasting formality and further offers an invitation to investigate Zoey Frank’s insistent painterly mark and her layered narratives.

Zoey Frank has an M.F.A. from the Laguna College of Art and Design and studied at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, Washington. Frank has received many noteworthy recognitions, such as artist residencies at the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University and the Artists Association of Nantucket. She has also received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and the Hudson River Fellowship, as well as various awards from publications such as Artist’s Magazine and the Art Renewal Center. Frank’s work has been exhibited internationally and has been featured in exhibitions at distinguished institutions including Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, the University of Wisconsin, the New York Academy of Art, Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Pietro Annigoni Museum, Florence, Italy, and the Laguna Art Museum.