Continuing to June 29, 2025
Frances McCormack and her work inhabit a terrain where idea, impulse, and gesture motivate an improvisational dance. Her thoughtful paintings mesh inquiry, experiment, and conclusion, resulting in works that at their best hold their own against any modern masters. McCormack’s current exhibition, a mini-retrospective of nature-based abstractions, is composed of large and mid-scale oils on canvas or panels, and a selection of recent small collages. Throughout, the artist displays a constancy of craft and vision. A monograph, “Frances McCormack: Rooted in Wonder,” accompanies the exhibition. The book features essays by curator Signe S. Mayfield and the artist herself, who characterizes her artistic journey as a metaphorical hunt, her senses ever alert for rustlings in the aesthetic brush.
In the present survey McCormack dazzles the eye with the show’s frontispiece, “Parting at Last” (1995). At 70 by 48 inches it is executed at a generous human scale that invites us to metaphorically step into the image. Earlier McCormack had often enlisted a sinuous “garden hose” element as a compositional device. Here, these snaking tubular forms not only formally divide the composition but mesmerize us as they inflate from a sketchy transparent line drawing into creamy, pale green, fully dimensional coils surrounding a central axis. A multitude of associations begins with that of the serpent wound around the tree of knowledge in Michelangelo’s “The Temptation and Expulsion from Paradise” (1508-1512, Sistine Chapel).
Division into horizontal bands, another of McCormack’s trademark devices, features a startling pale cream hue in the bottom third, with darker colors, a rich blue-black interspersed with brushy passages of sap green above. Snippets of the underpainting peek through — a tender apricot color, white, and ochre — while line work in red asserts its presence as thin calligraphic tracings.
In “The Needle’s Eye” (1993) McCormack orchestrates bold geometry and dramatic value contrasts, variations in texture and line quality, fuzzy blotted line, peek-a-boo layers, and a record of continual flips of the massive canvas. It’s a virtuoso display. There’s a toughness about this work, a defiance of gender stereotypes that assisted in navigating an art world not at the time too receptive to women. These early canvases are virile, intellectual works that take no prisoners.
“Persephone’s Return” (1996) introduces a central form suggesting a torso in a laced-up dress. With a flowing pattern of stylized leaf shapes, the elegant and serene composition is disrupted in the upper right quadrant by a jagged red splotch, evoking blood or trauma. McCormack contracted polio at the age of three, and her recollections of being confined within a corset-like restraint give the pinched shape — which also reads as a vase — a particular poignancy. Gravity-defying drips, here extending in vertical directions, are a favorite device of hers, achieved by rotating the canvas.
More recent works, “The Conversation” and “Sprites Near a Creek” (both 2019), feel unmoored and unsettling. Angular silhouettes of tree trunks in neutral grey-greens are overlaid with animated looping and knotted scrawls. The “garden hose” element has now evolved to suggest a mysterious presence.
Works from 2022-25 are all small collages on panel with near-symmetrical compositions relying on McCormack’s oft-used vase/corset shape. These works combine maps, book pages, musical notation, collaged or painted images of leaves, flowers, and other cutouts. Intricate, masterful, and lovely, they nonetheless pale by comparison to the earlier works.
McCormack’s contributions to Bay Area art also include her lengthy and influential teaching career, first at SF State and eventually at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she taught for 28 years. With McCormack’s retirement in 2018, and the peculiar circumstances of the intervening years (first the pandemic, after that … the deluge), a reevaluation and shifting of priorities is only natural. McCormack has noted in her musings on “wonder and limitation” that one can be constricted by boundaries and obstacles and, alternatively, liberated by them. They may provide a welcome structure and at the same time stimulate fresh creativity. If working on the larger scale no longer interests McCormack, her earlier physicality, her ability to push paint in directions with such force that we could taste it, still seems to demand a more visceral medium and approach. With her buoyant spirit, McCormack’s work, large or small, offers refuge that transcends any miasma to find the crisp air of her internal landscape, and continue the allegorical hunt.
