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Frances McCormack
Forcing Vase
70 x 48, oil on canvas
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Artist Statement “If mystery has a place, it will keep it.” - Oliver Sacks This group of paintings continues to play with ideas of restriction and limitation. The vase, the tree, the corset (just barely readable) and the framed view all depict, in various forms, the dynamic of limitation. What happens when we restrict our view, our space or our possibilities in general? Focus can be experienced as deepening or enriching, or as an obstacle to further possibilities. It is both. As someone who loves to play with form, to juggle one shape or color next to another, to change my mind endlessly, trees are fascinating. Their relentless verticality roots them in place and yet their play of form, as light and shade, or complex branch structure, speaks to our deepest intuitions of that which is unknowable. Corsets, vases and the enclosed garden, though restricting, are also containers of life. What happens in our experience when “adjacent things diminish”? We have access to focus and the experience of depth, the ability to perceive many aspects of a single entity. The best works of art make this happen. As a painter, the concept of limitation seems particularly relevant. After all, a painter moves colored dirt over a flat surface; simple procedure. And yet the canvas holds the traces of notion and presence in a way that few other things can.
Biography Frances McCormackBorn: Boston, Massachusetts EDUCATION University of California, Berkeley, MFA, 1986 San Francisco State University, MA in Painting, 1985 University of Massachusetts, Boston. BA in English, Summa Cum Laude, 1978 Teaching Credential, Secondary English AWARDS 2000 American Academy in Rome/ San Francisco Art Institute Fellowship 1997 Djerassi Foundation Residency, Woodside, CA 1996 Buck Foundation/ Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, Painting 1991 Buck Foundation/ Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, Painting 1987 Buck Foundation/ Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, Fine Arts 1986 University Art Museum Council Founders, Berkeley, CA Calder/ Hayes/ Jacobs Prize SELECTED EXHIBITS, SOLO 2005 “Bloom” (Two Person) Gwenda Jay/ Addington Gallery, Chicago, IL 2004 “Adjacent Things Diminish”, R. B. Stevenson, La Jolla, CA “Tales from the Land of Yes”, Museum of Contemporary Art at the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa, CA “Trinitas”, Museum of Contemporary Art at the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa, CA R.B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA 2001 R. B. Stevenson, San Diego, CA 2000 Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA 1999 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA 1998 Jack Meier Gallery, Houston, TX R. B. Stevenson, La Jolla, CA 1997 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA 1996 R. B. Stevenson, La Jolla, CA 1995 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA 1994 R. B. Stevenson, La Jolla, CA Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA 1993 Shaklee Building, San Francisco, CA, curated by Suzy Locke 1992 Courting the Present, Five Painters, curated by Anne Meisner, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, CA 1991 William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1989 William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA Bank of America, curated by Bonnie Earl Solari, Plaza Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1988 Southern Exposure, at Project Artaud, San Francisco, CA SELECTED EXHIBITS GROUP 2005 Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago IL 2004 “Good Vibrations” New Artists from California, Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago, IL 2003 “Contemporary Perspectives”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Rosa Eastside Editions, Sonoma, CA Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Wet Paint “Underfoot” Brasilia BiNatioonal Center, Brasilia Brazil. Travels to Instuto Cultural Brasileno NorteAmericano, Porte Alegre, Brazil 2002 “Mystery Ball” Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA “Shikishi” Bedford Art Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA “Selections” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, San Diego, CA 2001 “Underfoot” Associacao Alumni, Sao Paulo, Brazil “A Necessary Beauty” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, San Diego, CA 2000 “From Raucous to Refine” Bedford Art Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA “Perches in the Soul” Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA Art Alive 2000, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA Five Painters, R. B. Stevenson Gallery, San Diego, CA R. B. Stevenson Gallery, San Diego, CA San Francisco Art Institute Auction, Art From the Heart, Sonoma State University, February 1999 San Francisco International Art Exhibit, San Francisco Djerassi Residents Pages Exhibit, Palo Alto Cultural Center, CA 1998 San Francisco International Art Exhibit, San Francisco, CA “Illuminated Under White Light” R. B. Stevenson, La Jolla, CA San Francisco Art Institute Auction SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Pincus, Robert “The Way of All Things” San Diego Union Tribune, Dec 2004
Reviews and Articles San Francisco Chronicle, Sept 4, 2004 Painter Frances McCormack loves gardens. They give her an 'earthly vision of paradise' -- and plant seeds on her canvases. Leba Hertz Frances McCormack likes to grow things. She also likes to paint. She has found a way to combine those two interests, and the result is a garden of abstract delights. McCormack, 51, whose work is on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Rosa through Oct. 10, has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1990. In 2000, she received a fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome, giving her a perfect opportunity to visit the villas and public gardens. The current exhibition is an extension of her love of gardens. "This group of paintings is a continuation of my investigation into the history of gardens,'' McCormack writes in her artist's statement. "Depending upon the culture, the garden as a form implies many different things; respite from the harshness of the elements, sustenance, pleasure, power and even an earthly vision of paradise." McCormack applies materials to her paintings by moving the canvas in various directions, allowing gravity to affect the direction of the paint. "My paintings continue to emphasize the canvas as a contained space and my desire to witness the impulsive and impetuous or the restrained and subdued in that space,'' she writes. "Stark architectural elements combine with arbitrary, organic forms. The works are reflections of the unpredictable and arbitrary in a world of impersonal law. The materiality of paint and the history of decision are obvious and unapologetically optical. Form is referential but not realistic. Growth is reflected in the relentlessly vertical trunks of trees, the tender ghostly sprouting of a seed or the complex reaching of a vine." McCormack, who was raised in Boston and now lives in Sonoma County, is on sabbatical from the Art Institute. She plans to go to Mexico next summer to study the work of Mexican architect Luis Barrigan.
Art in America, February, 1995 by Robert L. Pincus As a Bay Area painter, McCormack has received a good deal of hometown attention for her work since she began exhibiting in the mid-'80s, but this was her first out-of-town solo. Working in a mode variously indebted to bio-morphic Surrealism (Matta in particular), Minimalist painting and Abstract Expressionism (both Bay Area and New York style), she also has a very contemporary predilection for letting pictographic imagery suggest anecdote. Against planar backgrounds with faintly architectural overtones, McCormack deploys bands or tubes that twist their way across the picture plane like life forms of some sort. She favors muted colors--olive green, browns and blacks--but she's not averse to the occasional flourish of pale orange or brilliant yellow. A passion for gardens informs much of her work, and of the painting in this show it can be seen most explicitly in Reply to Saturn II. A passage of iridescent blue at the bottom of the canvas suggests water. Floating on it is a vessel-like shape from which a profusion of flower forms emerges, made all the more dramatic by the dark background against which they are seen. Most of the paintings shown here don't suggest their subject so freely. The Small House of Our Cautionary Being can be read as either an exterior or an interior, though the dark archway makes it appear that we are looking into a pale space. McCormack's curving bands of color rise across and within that archway, like vines, but also expand across its surface in other directions. While these bands or tubes are her emblems of botanical life, a repeated corset or dress form becomes a figural stand-in for woman and, by implication, the artist. In Open, McCormack divides the corset in two, creating an ambiguous image that might indicate a heightened receptivity to the world, a mood of fragmentation, or aspects of both. To judge from the overall feel of the show, however, the more upbeat interpretation seems likelier. Without being syrupy or starry-eyed about it, her painting celebrates nature and our links to it. McCormack declares this bond forthrightly in Descending Dress, which depicts plant life sprouting luxuriantly from a dress form, as if it were a vase. The intersection of flora and figure, at once curious and affirmative, is here distilled into an image that might for now serve as the defining emblem of McCormack's art. COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc. McCormack's esoteric territories constitute profiled matter skimming over pictorial simulation. On the grand and medium scale, her extraordinary vocabulary winds up extremely dramatic, powerful and beautiful at once. Art in San Diego, 20 June 1998, Victor Hsieh McCormack's paintings are beautiful because they strive for a kind of material poetic statement possible only in painting. Not that they 'say' anything, rather they materialize a process of creative give-and-take that perhaps cannot be uttered but only shown. San Francisco Chronicle, 20 February 1994, Kenneth Baker |
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