DELECTABLE PATTERNS

LISA A. FRANK

When Spring warms the Earth, nudging new life, pushing through the cold hard crust of winter, we get renewed and renourished. Sprouts poke their way into the sunshine, fiddleheads unfurl, mushrooms mushroom, and tiny tender shoots and flowers offer themselves up for a greater good.

Their purpose is not pure beauty, yet they are beautiful in their purpose. To feed, to sustain, to enable a future.

Artist Lisa A. Frank captures the emerging wild beauty of spring in her magnificent scanographs. She creates her images by placing objects on the glass surface of a digital scanner and scanning them vs. photographing them with a camera.

Flowers, fruits, leaves, and stems are all shot at close range, regaling their intricate textures and complex forms.

In her earlier series, “Cabinet of Curiosities,” her images were single scans of arranged flora and fungi. Each petal, leaf, fruiting body, seed and spore becomes richly rendered, beautifully lit and masterfully composed.

“I have been interested in early natural history painting from the era when science and art were truly one, and botanical paintings did the recording work of a camera,” Frank explains.

As her work evolved, Frank began to explore digital montage, piecing together many scans, creating and repeating complicated patterns to form elaborate ornamental tableaux. Drawing upon her background in textile design and interior decoration, the works could be foundations for tapestries or fanciful wallpaper.

Frank is influenced by Britain’s Aesthetic Movement of the late 19th century, which also elevated edible and ornamental natural forms.

Frank’s most recent works are constructions pieced together from the hundreds of photos she took during her nature walks through the forests of upstate New York prairies of Madison, Wisconsin, where she currently lives.

She forms wall-sized “specimen panels” that show off nature’s gifts collectively, with constructed trompe l’oeil moldings to frames.

The repeating patterns are infinite. Frank can add to each piece, with more repeats to create installations that can fill a room.

The patterns are constructed from daily snapshots and scanographs composed in Frank’s using hundreds of layers. Nature becomes a construct.

“Choosing to focus on natural elements that are not commonly appreciated or used for decorative purposes, my artwork is connected to the “wildness” in nature even as it is taming it by the creation of formal patterning,” Frank explains.

“I ask myself questions about how to draw out the essence of something: what makes something special or dramatic or unusual or surprising.”

Frank holds an MFA in Design Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently part of the Discovery to Product (D2P) incubator, developing virtual reality content based on her photography.

Frank is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was the first artist to be given this distinction.

In addition to producing her fine art pieces, Frank designs textiles, wallpaper, and innovative surface treatments for residential and commercial interior projects. She has painted scenery for the Metropolitan Opera, films, and Broadway productions.

See more of Frank’s work here.

Read more about Beautiful Spring in 10 Beautiful Images & Idea About Spring and The Beauty of Virtual Spring Now.

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact Daily Fix posts.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Lactarius Mushrooms with Bellflowers.” “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
2. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Wild Night.” “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
3. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
4. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Jack in the Pulpit with Bolete.” “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
5. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Mushroom Diorama.” “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
6. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Farmers Market, Madison, WI.” “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
7. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Feared Loved.”
8. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Nature of the Pattern” Series.
9. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Garlands,These, I, Singing in Spring Collect for Lovers.”
10. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Farmers Market Festoon.”
11. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “When Walls Drop Away the Sky is Wide Open.” “Nature of Pattern” Series.
12. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “False Turkey-tails.” “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
13. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Cabinet of Curiosities” Series.
14. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Still Life with Hummingbirds.”
15. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “These Singing In Spring Collect for Lovers.”
16. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Nature of Patterns” Series.
17. Image: by BN App - Download now!
18. Image: by Lisa A. Frank. “Wallpaper of Our Day's Collection.” “Nature of Pattern” Series.