Interview with Peter Frank

about the results of "Colors of Life" competition

Lark: Peter, what is different about this particular competition?

Peter: I think that the theme of this competition, “Colors of Life,” brought a greater sense of lyricism to the selection. And this pertained not only to the colors the artists used but also to shapes. A good example of it would be Jenik Cook’s paintings, which combine fluidity with a good contrast between bright and dark colors.

Lark: You put Vered Galor into your ten best. What attracted you to her art?

Peter: She has a very dense visual field and a lot of information in her photographic collages. Although I could not see details, because her artworks are big, I could see that it has historical references, specifically on her series of work about Israel and the Holocaust.

Lark: Can you, please, say a few words about Cynthia Rogers assemblages?

Peter: I remember her work from previous competitions, and have always responded favorably to it. It’s tough to make endearing, nostalgia-filled assemblage that doesn’t tip over into cuteness or, conversely, snarkiness. There are soupcons of both flavors, as it were, in Rogers’ assemblages, but basically her wit and her sense of juxtaposit ion are fresh, appealing, and add to the clarity of her communication.

Lark: What about Juan Rosenfeldt, another honorable mention?

Peter: Like Cynthia Rogers he is able to rise above the clichés of contemporary assemblage and make a statement that isn’t just clever and decorative, but centered and even spiritual. He uses delicate materials, sometimes biological, sometimes musical. He doesn’t open up worlds, necessarily, but his objects have a certain votive power.

Lark: Tatjana Raicheneca, our honorable mention, seems to come from one of the Baltic republics.

Peter: Yes, to judge by her last name, but she didn’t provide us a Website connection. I found her two pieces to be very mysterious. She sets up very delicate patterns emphasizing both surface and illusory depth, so that you don’t know whether you’re reading the surface of the work or seeing a picture. It’s this pictorial quality and pattern quality occurring at the same time that drew me in.

Lark: Do you think it’s metal? Do you think it’s photo?

Peter: No, I don’t think it’s metal and I don’t think it’s photo, I think it’s handmade, painted or even drawn.

Lark: Can you comment on our third-place winner, Marylyn English?

Peter: English takes a visual as opposed to polemical approach to commentary on the environment, and her commentary is more potent because of that. Of course, ecological art mostly preaches to the choir, but by painting what seem at first to be conventional landscapes – deftly rendered and attractively colored -- English brings our attention back almost subversively to the pressing ecological issues of our time.

Lark: Would you consider our second place winner, Michael Chearney, a minimalist?

Peter: No, actually a maximalist, which is almost the same thing, in this case, because he paints in an abstract expressionistic manner, where every point of the canvas or the panel is as important as every other. The inference is that the painting can go on infinitely. You are lost in a sea of painting.

Lark: Could this style be considered derived from Jackson Pollock?

Peter: Pollock is considered the person who made all of this possible. But it has to do more with a general attitude.

Lark: Is this style still alive?

Peter: Yes, if an artist like Michael Chearney comes along and makes it his own and infuses it with a particular kind of life; Then it doesn’t look like Pollock and it doesn’t feel to me like Pollock.

Lark: Considering that so many artists worked in the footsteps of Pollock, it is difficult to be different, what make it in case of Michael?

Peter: The way he paints, the particular nature of Chearney’s fluidity, his choice of colors and the sense of his movement.

Lark: Finally, our first-place winner, Art Venti. He received almost twice as many points from all of our jurors as anyone else.

Peter: I’m very impressed, first of all, with his virtuosity, along with the apparent physical breadth of his work and the complexity of his imagery, which goes back and forth between abstraction and the evocation not just of the landscape, but specifically of either or both mountains and/or undersea imagery. It’s just very impressive work all the way around.

Lark: So if you didn’t know that he had done it all with pencil, would you still be attracted to his work?

Peter: Having not seen the real work – on-line we were able to judge the work’s scale and all that – even then I was impressed with it. There was nothing that indicated that it was done with pencil except the label. If it were the result of photographic or digital manipulation I would have been less impressed. The drama of the image and its texture, its very sensitive tonality, are all the more remarkable for having been hand-rendered. In fact, he could have used a wide range of colored pencils, but he limits his palette to a few to model the forms more dramatically.