Dana Frankfort & Alison de Lima Greene: A Conversation

July 1 - August 31, 2022

The following is a lightly edited record of a conversation that look place at Inman Gallery, Houston, July 1, 2022 in conjunction with a solo exhibition of new work by Dana Frankfort.

Alison de Lima Greene: Good afternoon Dana, thank you again for agreeing to take the time to discuss your Jugs Paint And Reuse paintings. My compliments on this beautiful installation! But to begin at the beginning, most of your paintings—including these newest works—establish a kind of a tango between text and abstraction. When did words first coalesce in your paintings?

Dana Frankfort: I started painting words in 1995 my first year of graduate school. It was an attempt to paint “what I know.” So quite literally I painted my name, my address, and so forth, so that when I’d return to my studio each day I wouldn’t have to arbitrarily choose something to paint. It was a huge relief to paint something that did not have to be renegotiated every day—like my name—that never changes.
These word paintings functioned both as a reminder to myself, as well as a sign to the viewer, that I was present. In addition to my interest in what the words meant, I quickly started treating the letters as abstract components that could move around the composition of the painting. Lines made up words, which then became structures that allow me to experiment with paint, shape, and color.

Image: Dana Frankfort, Dana Maurine Frankfort (detail), 1995, oil on panel, 24 x 48 inches. Photograph © Dana Frankfort
ALG: How do words function for you? A friend of mine, Michael Miller, who also used text in his paintings, described words as “lines with verbal skills.” Does that resonate with you?

DF: That definitely resonates with me. Words function for me in two ways. They are lines coming together to make linguistic meaning, and words can also fall apart back into being just lines. I’m most interested when an image teeters on this edge of being an abstraction (a series of lines) and a series of lines that take on linguistic meaning (a word).
Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), 1929

Image: Los Angeles County Museum of Art

© C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ALG: Of course, there’s a longer tradition of misdirection and humor involved, for example Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images which is famously inscribed “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” On a painting now owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, you wrote “BANANAS BANANAS” which always made me think of the Marx Brothers. Does humor play a role in your work?
Dana Frankfort, BANANAS (BANANAS), 2008

Image: Inman Gallery © Dana Frankfort
Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston¹

DF: Words without context can be really funny, and they can also be really heavy, which is the misdirection I think you’re talking about. I tend to be drawn to words that contain both of those elements, and I think these two ideas coexisting in the same painting is humor, like the word ‘Jugs.’ I should also bring up that there’s absolute sincerity involved my paintings and I don’t believe they’d work without it.

By the way, What’s so funny? was the title of my very first solo show (2005 at Brooklyn Fire Proof), and to me, this question is still relevant.
ALG: How did growing up in Houston lead you into painting? Did The Rothko Chapel have an impact on your work? I ask since many of your paintings seem to belong to very defined series, cyclical in nature, even though you eschew the monumental presence of Mark Rothko’s canvases.

DF: Growing up in Houston in the 1970s and ’80s shaped my aesthetic for color and surface, and light and landscape. I also believe it’s where I had my first taste of the monumental: neon billboards against the big Texas sky. And there’s no zoning in Houston, so residential living up against commercial spaces allowed me to see a kind of beauty in that jarring juxtaposition.
Mary Heilmann, Hawaiian Planet Study (detail), 2008, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

Image credit: artcritical

I didn’t start painting until I left Houston and went to college (at Brandeis University) in 1990 which is also when I made my first visit to The Rothko Chapel. Rothko’s paintings touched me profoundly, and I aspired to the gravitas of that space. At the same time, I wanted to integrate the austere presence of these iconic works with a complementary aesthetic that was equally important to me—exemplified by Mary Heilman’s soft, drippy, yet rigorous paintings.

Integrating words into my compositions gave me a way to give voice to brush marks and lines, which was my way to take control of and feminize the work.
Billboards on I-45, south of Houston
Source: https://twitter.com/kmays10/status/1270394581239160838

ALG: Can you say more about how Houston’s ubiquitous billboards invaded your imagination?

DF: Growing up, we spent many weekends in Galveston. At that time the drive on I45 South was mostly big open fields breaking into water, with billboards towering in the sky. I would imagine the signs were speaking to me. The big Texas sky, the low horizon, and the Heartbreakers and Jesus Saves billboards were a spiritual experience for me. My own Rothko Chapel.
ALG: However, looking around the current body of work, it strikes me that you are ushering text out of the room—it resonates still in certain paintings, but more in the form of pattern recognition than content.

DF: It’s being ushered out but it’s refusing to leave. The text is declarative in some paintings and in other paintings it reverberates.
ALG: I particularly like how you installed two of the JUGS paintings so that the eye picks up the dash of orange in the upper left. Can you talk about the illusion of light in these works?

DF: Landscape and light play a significant role in how I installed this show: the paintings are hung in relation to a horizon line, with the top edge of every painting at the same height (paintings are usually installed with matching center points). There is a suggestion of a sun overhead, and light bounces off of the letters as if they’re figures in a landscape.

When considering the internal dynamics of each painting, keep in mind that printed text in Western cultures generally sits along a horizontal line (as on this page, for example). I like to think about how the paintings function as words on a horizon, as phrases, sentences, and language fragments plucked from our surroundings.

Also, light is inextricably bound up with movement and an awareness of the passage of time.
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Installation image, Jugs Paint And Reuse (2022)
ALG: You’ve also pivoted to make the format of these compositions more compact, while adopting burlap and building up paint layers more and more adamantly. Are the paintings veering into objects?

DF: Yes, I’ve allowed the paint to build up instead of scraping and sanding it down, which is what I’ve done in the past. I have also, for the first time, glued actual objects on the paintings. For example, sometime in 2021 I glued shells I collected in Galveston onto the burlap of Paint, and it sat like this for about a year. I continued to paint around the shells and over the shells. Ultimately, I decided to scrape the shells off, and now the absence of the shells is a presence for me. I see these paintings as a series of accumulations and reductions. This is true in terms of the painting technique as well as in the way that words enter and leave each painting.

LEFT: early stages of Paint (2021/2022) with glued sea shells, in comparison to the finished work
ALG: How do you achieve the scumbled surfaces of these works?

DF: Layering, viscosity, transparency, touch. A few of these paintings were started and completed within 2022; however, most of the paintings in this show were started years ago, some as long as five years ago. The paintings have been through many stages, and while they appear quick and gestural, I am spending a considerable amount of time looking at—reading—each one. Returning and reworking.

ALG: You also make some truly diminutive paintings. Why?

DF: I approach small paintings in the spirit of “drawing,” in that they are low risk and disposable. I can get in and out of them quickly, and if I hate something I can paint over it or throw it in the trash.
ALG: I recognize some color combinations that have run through your work in the past, for example the seductive red/purple hues of one of the PAINT canvases. But other paintings are executed with much more liminal colors, which seems to me to be something of a new direction to me.

DF: Lately I've become more interest in color that's slower - like you see in Giorgio Morandi's meditative still lifes. I am also interested in what happens when saturated colors are layered to create brown, like the pours in a Morris Louis Veil painting.
ALG: And you have pointed out that one of the AND paintings is the most recent one. Do you see it as a punctum, or a pause? Or is it an indication of new things to come?

DF: I see it as a pause, in the same way that a comma functions as a pause. This painting is also where I consider this show to ‘end’. It contains a word that is no longer visible and suggests more about my process of painting a word and then redacting it, only to paint it in again.
"These paintings are slow and require sustained looking. They lean heavily into the language of painting, perhaps as a retreat. Or a protest."

ALG: Can you place these meditative works in the context of the past two years of retreat and isolation?

DF: For me, the past two years have been about introspection. These paintings are slow and require sustained looking. They lean heavily into the language of painting, perhaps as a retreat. Or a protest.

ALG: Are you willing to talk about your daughter Ruthie? Are you ever painting with her in mind as your audience?

DF: I love talking about Ruthie! She’s influenced me in so many ways, starting with her ability to slow down and deeply explore what interests her. I don’t know that I’m painting with her in mind as an audience, but since I am fortunate enough to experience the world through her eyes, I have to believe that her view is manifested in some way in these paintings
ALG: And finally, I have to ask, And Jugs Paint Reuse? Why? What’s this about?

DF: The title calls attention to the fact that the paintings are made independently but hang as a group. I have started to think about individual word paintings in relationship to sentences/rhetorical arguments/parts of the larger system of language.

For example, the word “Paint” names the action and also suggests that thinking about the language of painting is a worthy pursuit. I hope the title allows for more layers of meaning, and starts to point towards the way context allows individual words to communicate complex ideas.

ALG: And then how did the single canvas titled Effect sneak into this show?

DF: There’s the cause and then there’s the effect.
Notes
1. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchased funded by an anonymous donor, Kerry F. Inman and Denby Auble, Sandy Baum, Lester Marks and Dr. Penelope Gonzales, Cheryl and Stephen H. Golub, Velva G. and H. Fred Levine, Minnette and Jerome Robinson, Bruce and Shirley Stein, Joseph and Joyce Chesnick, Arnold and Candace Lipp, the Paula and Irving Pozmantier Philanthropic Fund of the Houston Jewish Community Foundation, Joyce Proler Schechter, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Stein, Clinton T. Willour, and Helen Dow, 2008.387

Alison de Lima Greene is the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Dana Frankfort is an artist and Associate Professor of painting at the University of Houston. She lives and works in Houston, TX.