Zoey Frank was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1987. She completed four years of classical atelier training under Juliette Aristides at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, and received an MFA in painting from Laguna College of Art and Design.
Over the last several years, time has been a central element in her paintings. Zoey Frank: 'I’ve painted from motifs that compose themselves differently over time—a lemon tree as it grows and its fruit matures, a cluttered living room, or a kitchen countertop that changes each day through use. Remnants of earlier states remain on the surface of the finished paintings.
I’ve become increasingly interested in pictorial space as well. I start from the premise that no one system used to create the illusion of space––from the Greco-Romans to the High Renaissance to the Abstract Expressionists––is more natural or accurate than the others, but each represents a distinct way of perceiving the world. In my recent work, I’ve become more deliberate about my approach to pictorial space, pulling out ideas from each historical period that I find compelling and repurposing them toward my own ends.
This focus on questions of time and pictorial space has led to the introduction of some abstract elements into my work. As compositional problems present themselves, I’ve started using arbitrary planes of color rather than objects to resolve them. This has freed me up to make intuitive, spontaneous changes while I’m painting. As I make these changes to balance the composition, the space of the painting becomes fragmented in a way that interests me.
Recently I’ve been working on a larger scale in my multi-figure compositions, filling the canvas with closely packed, life-sized figures. All of these paintings draw from art history. Some even use a specific painting as the underlying armature of the composition. Wedding, for example, is based on Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. I am interested in the relationships from one figure to the next—how one body presses up against the other, how the tilt or gesture of one figure can be repeated by the one behind. As I work, I find unexpected visual pathways that move the eye through the painting. The complexity of juggling so many elements at once is exciting. It is paintings like this that made me want to be a painter in the first place'.
About ‘At Home with Things’ (Galerie Mokum, September 2017)
'In my recent work, I’ve been exploring the way that domestic spaces are gradually composed over time. I’m interested in the way objects accumulate: in corners, on countertops, in the studio. There’s a kind of intimacy to how things come to look when we live with them.
In themselves, these objects have no special value for me. They’re cheap, mass-produced, disposable. Their colors are garish. But I have the sense that this is how is my life actually being spent: taking things in and out of the refrigerator, brushing my teeth, throwing things in the trash.
Three of the paintings show the same view of the window in my studio, recording the changes from afternoon to evening light and from winter into early spring. Each of these lighting conditions demands a new color palette, and I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to color in each piece. The “Dinner Party” is all in high-key neutrals, in “Peter’s Desk” each color is a saturated as possible, and several paintings are keyed around a single color (“Blue Still Life” or “Red Still Life” most obviously so).
I find the compositions of the paintings as I go, reacting to the way objects are moved and shifted about in everyday use, until I arrive at something unexpected but visually satisfying to me. I’ve left traces of this process of change, of past positions of the objects, visible in the final surface of the painting'.
Zoey has received numerous honors and awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields grants, the Avigdor Arikha Memorial International Residency Scholarship, the Artist’s Magazine All Media Competition Grand Prize of 2012, the Hudson River Fellowship in 2012, scholarships from the Albert K. Murray foundation, the Stacey Foundation and the Art Renewal Center.
Her work has been featured in Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Collector, the International Artist Magazine, Artist’s Magazine, and Southwest Art, and the Figurative Artists Handbook, among other publications, and is exhibited in galleries across the United States and Europe.