Kathleen Frank | Joyous Adventure

Kathleen Frank delights in finding pattern and beauty in nature’s design

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Years ago, when she was pursuing woodcarving, Kathleen Frank remembers being in a carvers’ supply shop and sheepishly confessing to the owner that she sometimes used an electric tool to initially remove excess wood from a piece. Then she would turn to hand chisels, gouges, and mallets for the more detailed work. The owner smiled and told her there was no need to feel guilty: “If the old artists had had these tools, they would have used them!” he said. Today, as a landscape painter, Frank views the computer in a similar way. With a photograph on the screen, she can crop, highlight colors, and begin to envision the image as it will later emerge on the easel in her Santa Fe studio. “The computer is a great visual tool in preparation for painting,” she says.

It is especially helpful in expressing pattern and rhythm in the landscape. This, along with color, is an essential and compelling feature of Frank’s work. “Pattern in nature is primal—the need to find a glimmer of logic in a vastly complicated, confusing, and tumbled landscape,” she says. “I try to catch the design in all its strangeness and beauty.” She calls the endeavor a “joyously daunting adventure,” one that takes place not only in the studio but also out in the landscape itself, in the mountains and wilds of her beloved West.

Looking back over her life, Frank finds it no surprise that she has taken on the challenge of discovering and conveying the complex beauty of the natural world. “Adventure is part of my DNA,” she says. Her great-grandparents were among the intrepid 49ers who made their way to California in the mid-1800s in search of a better life during the Gold Rush. The artist’s mother, with her degree in history, led her two daughters in exploring old mining towns and told stories of their great-grandmother’s travels by wagon train. Frank’s great-grandfather owned thousands of mules and wagons that carried supplies into, and gold and silver out of, rugged terrain in the mountain West. Before that, her ancestors crossed the sea from Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and Wales. “It’s all part of the quilt of who I am,” Frank says.

This family history in the West led to a deep connection with the land itself. Through much of her early life, the family regularly spent time in the Mother Lode area of the Sierra Nevada. She still likes to retreat there to the family cabin to hike and photograph inspiring scenes. On the road to the mountains when she was young, the family often stopped to visit a printmaker at his home and studio in a former Gold Rush town. “I was impressed with that simple life in a small mountain town where people came to buy his prints,” she says.

From an early age Frank also glimpsed the creative life of other family friends, including married watercolor painters who were neighbors in Corona del Mar, CA. “They taught classes and, to me, lived a fairy-tale life as artists,” she says. As a teen, when the family lived in the San Francisco Bay area, she often accompanied another neighbor on plein-air outings. She remembers standing side by side with the artist and painting the same scene, sometimes of small sailboats sitting off-kilter in the mud at low tide. Her interest in art was further fueled by excellent art classes in public schools.

At the same time, Frank was inspired by a life of teaching and travel, with both parents in teaching careers and summers dedicated to family road trips and international travel. In the 1950s her parents loaded up the station wagon and drove with their daughters to Guatemala. The painter now recognizes Mexico and Central America as early sources of her intense love of color and pattern. Later she took a year off from college—while working toward a fine art degree at San Jose State College (now San Jose State University)—to join her parents on a sabbatical round-the-world trip. The experience included visits to art museums and artists’ studios in many countries.

When it came to her own career, Frank turned to what she knew best and trained to teach art. “Even though I admired the artists I knew and thought their lives were amazing, I wasn’t dreaming enough about being one myself,” she says. She graduated with a design degree and taught elementary school art, first in California and then in Colorado while her husband was working on his doctorate. In Pennsylvania she earned her master’s with a printmaking focus from Penn State University and taught printmaking and costume design at a private girls’ high school. For her master’s exhibition she produced screen-printed costumes representing goddesses, each with her own story, which later were displayed in elaborate performances and exhibits. Around the same time, she cofounded the Printmakers Studio Workshop of Central Pennsylvania, where printmakers could create and show their work.

In 2002 Frank and her New Mexico-born husband, Bill, bought a condo in Santa Fe, where they began spending vacations in preparation for his retirement. By the time they made the permanent move in 2008, she had transitioned into full-time fine art. Prompted by helpful interrogation from an artist friend and mentor, she returned to her early passion for painting. “He asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up,” she says, smiling. “I told him I wanted to be an artist, not a teacher, and he let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to figure out how to do that.”

Pinning down a genre was easy. Years of hiking, camping, and photographing the landscape in California, Colorado, and now New Mexico had instilled in Frank not only a love of the land but also an intuitive sense of the visual flow of landforms, vegetation, and colors. On a canoeing trip in Ontario, she was introduced to the early 20th-century Canadian landscape painters known as the Group of Seven. “They were a strong influence on my painting style. Their work was exciting, colorful, and joyful,” she says. The Canadian painters lived on location during the summer, creating oil sketches that they used to produce large studio paintings in the winter. “I do the same with my camera. I find paintings in my lens and come home and paint the best of them,” Frank says.

Another element in Frank’s approach to painting, especially early on, was her extensive experience in woodcut printing. Over a red underpainting, she employed the brush almost like a woodcarving tool, putting down distinct strokes—like gouges in wood—that left thin spaces for the undercoat to show through. Recently she has noticed a shift in her paint application, though. While she still begins with a red underpainting, her brush strokes have evolved to become more layered and blended, she says. Vibrant with color and life, her newest work has a smoother feel, less reminiscent of woodblocks.

In other ways, Frank’s art continues to reflect her background, in particular the kinds of experiences that for decades have drawn her to wild places. “I love being up high and looking down through openings, through portals into the beautiful vista beyond,” she says. VISHNU’S PORTAL is one such view. Observed through a space between landforms in the Grand Canyon, the large vertical canvas features layers of color and depth receding into the distance. “I love how the foreground is in shade and then the view bursts out into sunlight,” the artist says.

Likewise, PATH TO THE TETONS draws the eye along a winding path of cool, shadowy hues amid golden grasses dancing in the autumn sun. The painting is based on a photograph Frank took during an October visit to Jackson, WY. Setting out early one morning, she discovered it had snowed overnight, and the bright sun was illuminating clumps of melting snow. “The lighting was perfect, and I loved the details of the dying fall foliage in the foreground, the barn in the middle, and mountains in the background,” she says.

Among other especially inspiring spots for Frank: the Sierra Nevada, which has maintained a special place in her heart since childhood; Telluride and Crested Butte in Colorado; and the red cliffs near Abiquiú in northern New Mexico, a landscape made famous by Georgia O’Keeffe. “I wander all over the place. I like getting into good places you don’t see from roads,” Frank says. Wherever she travels, she brings memories and photos back to the large, well-lit studio in her home. Her whole home, in fact, reflects the cultures and colors of places she or family members have visited and the things she and Bill love to collect: folk art, natural elements including lavender from her garden, and her own and other artists’ paintings showcased against dusky red walls. “I look for the brilliance and gaiety of life around me,” she says. “There is so much joy and adventure to paint in one lifetime.”

representation
La Posada de Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; J.J. Gillespie Gallery, McMurray, PA; Saks Galleries, Denver, CO; Jane Hamilton Fine Art, Tucson, AZ; Christopher-Clark Fine Art, San Francisco, CA; www.kathleenfrankart.com.

This story appeared in the April/May 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.