Jerrys Plains, Martindale is an example of the varnish paintings for which Dale Frank has been known since the late-1990s/2000s. This is an abstract work which, despite its locationally specific title, depicts a location, or reality, which is internal, visionary and esoteric. Rather than the browns, ochres and greens of rural Australia, we are presented with a poisonous and acidic palette with indigo, teal and lavender forming amorphous blobs both on top of and within a field of pinks and cool reds. This other-worldly and psychedelic commingling of colours takes place on an immersive field, two by two metres, and encourages engagement on a bodily, rather than simply visual, level.
The varnish paintings are a unique visual form but also a continuation of a practice which has always been concerned with the role of the body. They are distinctively performative, their laborious creation evidenced in the temporally frozen flows of varnish across the painting’s surface. Through trial-and-error, Frank has learnt the way different varnishes operate and interact with each other, and how their reactions with other varnishes change depending on how far along the drying process they are. These properties are exploited as he props and angles the horizontal support, tending to it throughout the drying process, which can take up to eight hours. A link can be thus be drawn between the varnish paintings and Frank’s formative performance works with a focus on the body being put through arduous physical strain (Chapman p.342).
Dale Frank has spent his career playfully exploring and employing modernist art forms, often in an irreverent dadaist mode. (Magon p.45) One instructive example is when he displayed his own toenail on a plinth as a tiny analogue to Richard Serra’s monolithic modern sculpture in Tilted Arc, Steel, Richard Serra, 1998. In Jerry’s Plains, Martindale we see the legacy of Abstract Expressionism in the pouring of wet varnish, and a continuation of Frank’s engagement with Surrealism, where the wet and globular forms evoke biology and a chaotic psychic reality. Pockets of wet varnish remain under the surface skin of the works and cause Frank’s paintings to continue, like bodies, to sag and alter with time, under the strain of vertical placement in a gallery.
Dale Frank has always relished in the playful naming of his artworks, employing names which are profound, verbose or bizarre. He has used long titles and pop culture references in order to introduce possible subtexts and alternative readings, arising from the engagement between title, viewer and the work’s visual content (Stutchbury p.239). Frank has been using specific place names as titles in his recent abstract paintings in order to both position these works as landscapes and critique landscape painting as a representational genre. Frank claims that landscape painting has always been abstract, presenting an emotive and idealised image of the landscape, removed from actual lived experience, and only recognisable as landscape via the inclusion of coded symbols like the horizon line or trees (Crawford p.207).
Jerrys Plains, Martindale demonstrates Dale Frank’s engagement with and commentary upon the history of painting while evidencing a matured practice unafraid to create and explore unique visual forms. Immersive, performative and confronting, the work demonstrates Franks progress while remaining indicative of the concerns presented by his entire body of work.
Reference List
Magon, J. 1992. Dale Frank. Tortola, British Virgin Islands: Craftsman House BVI Ltd.
Stutchbury, S. 2007. Strung out in heaven’s high. in L. Seear and J. Ewington (eds.) Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art, 1966-2006. Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Art Gallery.
Chapman, C. Essay, in D. Frank and C. Chapman. 2007. So Far: The Art of Dale Frank 2005-1980. Melbourne, Victoria: Schwartz City.
Crawford, A. Dale Frank. Art and Australia, Vol. 42 no.2.
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