Robyn A. Frank - About Inside
“About Inside” is a celebration of self-expansion. It externalizes the permeable boundaries of our interior sense-of-self through a visual language of celestial shapes and colors. A celebration of change — the cyclical duality of creation and loss — the compositions create an intangible space where past, present, and future assemblages of our self culminate in a soft expanse of possibility. Using allegory, reoccurring symbols include the circle, resembling a sun or moon, the self, a path that is forever becoming; the wavy line, an energetic manifestation of emotions and emotionality, evoking uncertainty and discovery contained within each moment; the rectangle within a rectangle as the ego or self-narrative that exists within a larger societal narrative. Drawing further inspiration from New Mexico’s big sky, varied hues, and cloud shapes relate to the activity of transition, both emotional and physical; a stage of vast possibility.
About Inside
About Inside, a drawing exercise
Materials required:
8.5” x 11” sheet of paper/ material to write upon
Pen/ item to write with
Desk or a place to push on while you write
Chair or a place to sit while you push on what you write on
Window, or generally sitting facing an opening that offers long distance vision
“Sisters, a dance”
16” x 20”
Acrylic paint on wood panel
February 2020
Sisters, a dance
Is it a feeling or a truth,
That binds
Feeling, a fleeting
Mystery of a memory that lives in the present
Truth, a connector that roots our feet
To what?
That changes.
“A sense of place made of seeking, a sense of seeking made of places”
16” x 20”
Acrylic paint on wood panel
February 2020
A sense of place made of seeking.
A sense of seeking made of places.
A light that dances, and warms my eyes.
A shadow that moves, and shapes my mind.
Finding where big and small are
mingling, arriving, and beguiling
“You’re it/ That art thou”
16” x 20”
Acrylic paint on wood panel
February 2020
When the bottom falls out
But you didn’t like it anyways
A funny groundless floating begins
Some things strange
Some things familiar
It’s in attitude — for one —
can become another
So onwards, I row in my bottomless boat
cutting my oars
Strange
Familiar
And seasons change
“Ungrounding”
16” x 20”
Acrylic paint on wood panel
February 2020
Another rotation around the sun
That turn returning, but not to a from.
Shadows reach long, biding,
but I am gone.
Along but not forgotten, with my to and from.
“And will be again”
16” x 20”
Acrylic paint on wood panel
February 2020
It can seem like wavering but its a path
compelled by gravity, forces unseen.
Like a crack in armor, or rock
a record of what’s been.
Belonging, you speak as if you own me —
are owed me. Yet
Clouds form from mother mist
and float away to drench pastures unseen.
To become mother mist, a part of a piece.
Ask not does mist of cloud to stay
Because apart of a piece it’s always been
And will be again.
Robyn A. Frank received her BFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute. Formerly a professional fine art fabricator, Frank made work for world-renowned artists including Takashi Murakami, Y.Z. Kami, and Dennis McNett. In response to slowing work after the financial collapse of 2008, Frank began a career in business administration, eventually becoming the People Operations Director at the global product design agency, AREA 17. After many visits to New Mexico, she relocated to Albuquerque at the start of 2019 to reconnect with her roots as a visual artist. This show is a celebration of change and creating space for the person you seek to become.
Pieces are available for purchase on the artists website: www.RobynAFrank.com
Follow her on Instagram at @robynafrank
Contact
info@trapdoorprojects.com