It’s Day 200!  Only 165 days to go!  I can’t believe I’ve done this without a hitch for this long.  I’m very excited to be painting and working with spackle today.  Join me in honoring Jane Frank today!

 

Jane Schenthal Frank (born Jane Babette Schenthal) (July 25, 1918 – May 31, 1986) was an American artist. She studied withHans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg and is known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, and textile artist. Her landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings are included in some important public collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Jane Frank was a pupil of Hans Hofmann. She can be categorized stylistically as an abstract expressionist, but one who draws primary inspiration from the natural world,

particularly landscape — landscape “as metaphor”, she once explained. Her later painting refers more explicitly to aerial landscapes, while her sculpture tends toward minimalism. Chronologically and stylistically, Jane Frank’s work straddles both the modern and the contemporary (even postmodern) periods. She referred to her works generally as “inscapes”.

Jane Frank’s paintings and mixed media works on canvas are in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (“Amber Ambience”, 1964), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art (“Winter’s End”, 1958), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (“Red Painting”, 1966), the Arkansas Arts Center^[2]in Little Rock (“Web Of Rock”, 1960), and the Evansville Museum (“Quarry III”, 1963). Her works are in many other public, academic, corporate, and private collections.

Jane Frank (when she was still Jane Schenthal) attended the progressive Park School and received her initial artistic training at the Maryland Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art), earning in 1935 a diploma in commercial art and fashion illustration [Watson-Jones]. She then acquired further training in New York City at what is now the Parsons School of Design (then called the New York School of Fine and Applied Art), from which she graduated in 1939 [Stanton]. In New York she also studied at the New Theatre School. Her schooling complete, she began working in advertising design and acting in summer stock theater. From the sources, it is unclear whether she worked in these fields while still in New York, or only after returning to Baltimore. We do know, however, that she began painting seriously in 1940.

The single best source on Jane Frank is The Sculptural Landscape of Jane Frank

(1968), by Phoebe B. Stanton (the art history professor emerita at Johns Hopkins University who died in 2003). Stanton’s text provides a guide to Jane Frank’s life and work, and there is a helpful and liberal use of quotations from the artist herself, enabling the reader to understand how Frank’s thinking evolved, especially from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. The book (out of print but still in many public and university art libraries) also contains a wealth of biographical information and many large plate reproductions of the artist’s works, some in color. There are also photographs of the artist.

Jane Frank’s preoccupation with space was evident even before her paintings became overtly “sculptural” in their use of mixed media. Of the paintings in the 1962 Corcoran Gallery show, she tells Phoebe Stanton: “I was trying to pit mass against void and make it look as though there were passages that went way back – that’s why ‘crevice’ is in so many of the titles” (Stanton, p. 15). Indeed, “Crags and Crevices” (70″x50″, oil and spackle on canvas), completed in 1961, dominated the show.

Soon after the month-long Corcoran Gallery solo exhibition, Jane Frank began to apply not just spackle but a

variety of other materials – sea-weathered or broken glass, charred driftwood, pebbles, what appears to be crushed graphite or silica, and even glued-on patches of separately painted and encrusted canvas (canvas collage) – to her jagged, abstract expressionist paintings. “I wanted work that was painterly but with an actual three-dimensional space”, she later wrote (Yoseloff 1975, pp. 37–39). Jane Frank’s first solo show at New York’s Bodley Gallery (1963), as well as her 1965 solo show at Baltimore’s International Gallery, featured many of these radically dense and variegated mixed media paintings.

Partial biography is from wikipedia.  It’s a long and detailed one so go check it out!

I hope you enjoy my piece today!  I mainly played around with spackle and sand and attempted to make it look cave-like.  I hope I captured Jane Frank’s essence and style.  I’ll see you

tomorrow on Day 201!  Whew and Best, Linda