Laurence Simmons on Dale Frank

Laurence Simmons on Dale Frank

Featured in Minimal Opulence: The Gary Langsford and Vicki Vuleta Collection

A feature of Dale Frank’s painting has been its inherent simplicity and apparent effortlessness. Summer of Love and the Swimmer problem — the sea of love broken down, crudely materialised, is just paint slipping and varnish, literally flattened. But look more closely. Is this work really that simple?

In Summer of Love Frank’s clouds of brown varnish are emblems of the enigma of perspectival space, amorphous and difficult to pin down, they seem to embody the mystery of that invisible depth that painting is somehow able to bring about on a two-dimensional surface. The tension between them is constant and eventful, full of jangling, caressing surprises that globulate. The formal dissonance of Frank’s painting is the engine of his seductiveness. Our eyes revel immersively in the contradictory effects. This is why I think Frank’s art is fundamentally conceptual, for he is just as much attempting to paint an idea — a distance that can be made visible — as anything actually visible. His work is hedged with conflicts and chances and limitations even in its moments of profligate beauty and celerity when his paint falls like loose change. You begin to understand in a word how radical he is, radically interrogating art, restlessly nagging and pushing and trying to force his painting to make good its promise. The combination of liquidity and gravity (both in the sense of ‘downward force’ and ‘seriousness’) connects Frank’s work to the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock.

How do you get all that from this painting you may want to ask? You get it by looking carefully and calmly, and by noticing what isn’t there. Here’s a preliminary list:

Gesture. The marks in a Frank painting result from tipping the canvas, not directly from his hand as such. The paint and the movement of it are different things, without seeming connection, this is what makes them so real. We might speak of the emptiness of the artist’s speaking position and this emptiness being somehow Australian. Frank’s paintings have been read as self-portraits and advertisements for himself but is his art more of a self-disguise than an exercise in self-expression?

Expression. Frank’s painting never functions as a commentary on anything. Sure the long and abstruse titles might seem to send you in a direction with their crude jokiness. But this is a red herring (excuse the pun). Is the emotionally fraught red of Summer of Love the red of sanguinity, bloodthirsty sharks in the sea? Where is the depiction of the ‘summer of love’ in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in 1967? Can we see a ‘swimmer’ in the painting drowning
in love? The titles are not so much funny as ecstatically cracked — a sort of safety valve for
the demonic act of painting. It is laughter in a void. Sincerity is never an issue; sentimentality is inconceivable. Frank’s paintings function instrumentally and neutrally. And yet, as I have already started to discover, and as Frank, in his artist’s statement at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, October 1986, intimates, his work contains: ‘A powerfully expressive symbolism which is so unalterable in its forms that a person uninitiated may at once recognise a work of signification without knowing its meaning.’

Drawing. There is no planning here. No preliminary drawing. Instead paint makes the painting. While it is based on stopping and starting, the choreography of the composition is not hesitant but bold and theatrical. The painting is about how it is experienced, how it works. Then it is all captured under varnish like an insect in amber. Frank’s paintings feel constantly wet, transparent like nail polish.

Decoration. A Frank painting is not a design nor designed. It’s not decoration. Decoration doesn’t involve you with thinking about how something was done. But a Frank painting lets you think about nothing else. Why way up or down does the paint run in Summer of Love? Why does the varnish slosh into globules here and here? Why do the great droopy swathes of blurred varnish suddenly stop at this point? Frank’s paintings are essentially eidectic, meaning reliant on the capacity that makes us want to see animals or faces in clouds or cracked walls. Remember the famous exchange between Hamlet and Polonius (Act 3, Scene 2):

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud, that’s almost in shape like a camel? Polonius: By the mass and ’tis — like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.

Frank’s paintings evolve from the accidental properties of his materials and from the irrational associations of his viewers. It’s painting as an hallucinogenic drug. Is the artist high on varnish? Is his viewer?

Transcendence. Critics have identified a shamanic twist behind Frank’s work but his is a dubious mysticism. Apparently in his youth he was going to enter the Catholic priesthood. However, despite being promoted as an ‘outsider genius’, there is no psycho-spiritual lift-off here. These are just paintings. At the same time they seem to be asking for transcendence or asking why it cannot be in this painting. The silence of a Frank painting is the silence of listening for an answer. Maybe there isn’t an answer, just the listening.

As might be expected, Frank’s work beggars standard modes of analysis, whether formal or empirical. It ruins all my efforts here. It is as if he were saying in effect: ‘Here is some paint. Did you by chance expect something else in a painting?’ The fact that Frank’s paintings are just paintings, the radical materiality of them, is what stuns you (stupifies you) at first. Each painting is an enigmatic attempt to capture enigmatically the enigma of painting. But a Frank painting keeps on being a painting, beautiful, lively and forlorn, elusive.

Laurence Simmons