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In an artist's studio: color and language
By Peggy High
On a fall day of peerless blue sky and high-flying clouds, seven Upper School students of drawing and design, including those taking the Advanced Placement portfolio course, had the perfect atmosphere in which to visit the studio of Dana Frankfort, artist and Chapin Lower and Middle School art teacher. Accompanied by Duane Neil, head of the art department, and Marianne Brand, Middle and Upper School art teacher, the girls circled Ms. Frankfort’s spacious, light-filled room in Long Island City. They examined with care her oil paintings on wood, in which single words or phrases appeared, some emerging more clearly than others, from the rich layers of color that distinguish her work.
Ms. Frankfort, who has a master of fine arts in painting and printmaking from Yale University, received a Guggenheim grant that has allowed her to spend the fall semester away from Chapin as she prepares for an upcoming show of her work. The exhibition, which will take place in Los Angeles, is titled “Believer.” Ms. Frankfort, who gives equal attention to language and color, finds inspiration in slogans, in a journal with lists of words, and in signs — those “billboards against the sky” — punctuating the landscapes of Texas and Colorado, familiar to her from childhood. For the students, she posed a philosophical question: “If nobody is there to read a sign, is it still talking?”
Members of her audience, clearly appreciative of being in the studio of a working artist, asked searching questions of their own, such as “How do you know when a work of art is finished?” a query that Ms. Frankfort said kept her awake at night, and “If the words painted into a work of art are in a different language, can you express the same thing?” That, too, was difficult to answer, but on the other hand, Ms. Frankfort had no trouble in giving the students some excellent advice. As a lover of language, she had this to offer: “Artists have to know how to write; even a paragraph has to be well written.” And regarding their artistic endeavors, she said: “Embrace every phase; you don’t know where each one will take you.”
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