Frances McCormack’s residencies at Aurobora found the artist exploring the skeletal structure of her complex, layered paintings. In her works on paper, McCormack employs imagery that implies constraint, limitation, and release. A coil-like rope form, floral shapes that entwine and meander, the subdued palette, under-drawing that fades out and emerges again — all add to a creative tension inherent in the path between impulse and order, expansion and containment.
McCormack experimented with various approaches in the studio. Painting directly on a plexiglass matrix, she would run ghost images over stenciled areas and then draw directly on top transparent flats. Other times McCormack would begin a print by first running a flat of a single muted color and then print a charcoal crayon drawing over additional stencil forms. This slow accretion of imagery might first appear happenstance but ultimately reveals itself as a set structure, a natural structure that codifies an intrusion of natural forces.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Bank of America, San Francisco, CA; Law Firm of Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, San Francisco, CA; Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA; Sharon Heights Country Club, Palo Alto, CA; Pacific Bell Telephone, San Francisco, CA
