Contemporary art has a wide embrace. For every artist who is brashly loading a dumpster with detritus, there is another who is quietly painting at the easel, filling a studio, and then a gallery, with pictures.
Kevin Frank is one of the latter. His still-lifes, modest in size and large in beauty, are nestled conceptually into the folds of the 18th Century. A rotund copper pot, a trio of onions, a glass of water half filled are the objects of his attention, rendered with all the glint, luster and crystalline clarity of their 300-year-old kin. “The long and short of it is that I paint what I see,” says the artist.
That is indeed the short of it. The long of it is that Frank imbues his pictures with a contemporary sensibility — he has been painting for more than 25 years — often throwing an anachronistic vase or irreverent tchotchke into a refined still-life mix, and referencing art history as he goes along. That he works in encaustic — pigmented wax applied in its molten state — is another anachronism. Famously the medium of the so-called Fayums, those Greco-Roman burial portraits unearthed in and around the Fayum oasis in Egypt in the 1850s, encaustic has long been replaced by oils in picture-making.
In his most recent work, Frank stirs up the pot — whether curvaceous porcelain or hammered copper — with his unique mix of sincere homage, sly wit and impeccable technique. Chardin, one of Frank’s early and enduring favorite painters, is his touchstone. In Partridge, Pear and Snare, Frank has reproduced the eponymous tableau. Object by object, he set up the scene and lit it just so. It’s not actually a painting of a painting, then, but a painting of the reassembled scene. So focused is Frank on detail that he had a taxidermist pose a real partridge in the manner of the freshly caught original and then nestled its plump body next to a ripe red pear. If there is something of a hall-of-mirrors convolution of image and reality, it is simply the result of Frank’s curiosity of how a painting comes into being and the mechanics of what he describes as “building a painting from the ground up.”
Bracketing this technical tour de force are Still-Life with Portrait and Still-Life with Flag, reference and homage to his chosen medium and its most well-known exponents. The portrait in Portrait is a Fayum from the First Century. Frank had photocopied an image of the painting to actual size, “to examine the brushstrokes,” he explains, “and to understand what size and shape brushes the painter used.” Mounted on foamcore, it subsequently became an object in the studio, and like many objects, found its way into a composition. The simplicity of Frank’s painting — the doleful countenance of the young man, the shape of which is echoed by the lyre — makes you think it could have been realized any time in the past 2000 years.
From the time the Fayums were discovered, artists have experimented with the “new” medium, but Jasper Johns, through a combination of his pioneering use of it and the fame he achieved for his works in it, brought encaustic into our time. In Still-Life with Flag, Frank reassembles some of Johns’s most iconic objects, from a 48-star flag to the exact model of flashlight, into an homage that is obviously referential, but quirkily his own.
Pigmented wax is a demanding master. Kept molten on a heated palette, it begins to cool and thus harden the moment it leaves the heat source. Beginners often end up with a brush stuck to their painting. Experienced painters like Frank have learned to acquiesce to the process, applying brushstrokes lightly and quickly. (His brushwork is as nimble as that on a Fayum.) The quickly transformative nature of encaustic is a boon to his work. When glazing in oils, you have to wait a day or two between layers. With encaustic, the layer is "dry" as soon as it cools. “I’m getting effects I’ve seen in Old Masters' works,” says Frank. “Eight years into it and I’m still learning.”
Frank’s viscerally beautiful pictures invite the viewer to enter the dimensions of the space, visually and emotionally, and travel through it fully engaged in the sensual act of seeing. “Still-life is often considered the bottom of the food chain in the art world. To me it’s challenging,” says Frank. “I find the world in a still-life.”
— Joanne Mattera
Joanne Mattera is a nationally exhibited painter. She is the author of The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (Watson Guptill, 2001)
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