Painter's work a galloping success

The will to form is a gut impulse: Whatever an artist is feeling in the moment is what comes out on canvas. Move over, George Stubbs -- Nancy B. Frank is feeling her oats. The path she took was long and winding, but the artist has finally, happily hit her stride as a horse painter.

Frank's horses are powerful, beautifully articulated, sensually brushed. Dignity and intelligence shine through their eyes. It seems as if they are all winners. These larger-than-life images don't just rinse the eye, either. We get a full bath.

Frank's first one-woman show, "Caballos y Gauchos," opened Aug. 16 at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art and runs through Sept. 16.

When she was a girl, Frank did not just love horses, she thought she was a horse.

"My best friend, Peggy, and I galloped around the dining room table on our hands and knees. We galloped around the block with scarves sticking out of our pants to look like tails," she said.

Frank has studied art intensively, first at Ohio Wesleyan, then in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been a professional artist in a variety of media her entire adult life, but she never quite found her voice, until now.

The artist, who has lived here since the early 90s, has always worked successfully in a variety of mediums - jewelry, furniture, and photography. Her whimsical, over-the-top cakes landed her in The New Yorker. When she painted, however, Frank's subject matter was across the metaphorical map: planets, pearls, birds and bats galore. While decorative and technically proficient, these earlier works amounted to lots of hustle, no flow. Frank was stuck in her head and, and she knew it. (She has always been her harshest critic.)

Until this show, the artist's two primary disciplines - painting and photography - and her passion for travel, especially on horseback, had never come together in her studio.

The answer was hidden in plain sight until a conversation last January with Will Thompson, owner of the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art.

When Frank showed Thompson a series of digital color photographs of the horses from her Uruguay trip, he suggested a radical thing: Don't stop with the prints -- turn them into paintings.

Horse painting has a long history: think about the Parthenon frieze, the equestrian portraits of Verrocchio and Donatello, the regal equines of Peter Paul Rubens, Degas' horses at the racetrack and Picasso's "Guernica."

In the 18th century, Stubbs (1724-1806) became the go-to guy when it came to horse images. To this day, the man is widely considered the best horse painter who ever lived.

Now, however, a dark horse is closing in from behind.

The fact that her horse images are anatomically correct - more in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci and Stubbs than Susan Rothenberg or Debra Butterfield - is no big surprise knowing Frank's long history with equines and her well-honed artistic skills.

Why, then, did Frank paint around her natural subject all these years?

The reason is simple: Frank swallowed the standard rap on horse and "sporting" art in general, hook, line and sinker: holier-than-thou critics, even other painters, have long looked down on animaliers as minor artists who produced work for the amusement of the leisure class. That was true even in the 18th century, the Age of the Horse. It is, however, less true today.

"So many people like me love the power and grace of a horse, but for years I felt trying to capture that majesty on canvas was such a cliche."

Thankfully Frank snapped out of it, so to speak.

Her digital images from Uruguay that became this show - there were 50 or more shot with a 24 to 120mm Nikon lens - were taken in the space of five minutes just after a ride and just after lunch as gauchos were leading horses back to the barn to be saddled up.

Frank does not like empty spaces on her canvasses, so she photographed the horses in extreme close-up to fill the screen and, subsequently, the picture plane with haunches, heads, manes, tails, glossy coats, bits and reins.

The resulting work is fraught with the dynamic tension of these powerful, proud creatures bound up with tack, seemingly submissive as they are being pulled along back to the corral.

The operative word is "seemingly."

The two horses in #5 look truly defiant: they appear to have breached the boundary of the picture plane and are not just in our face. They are in our space.

All these images beg the question: Who is really in charge?

Frank sides with the horses, any one of which is a plausible hero for the artist:

"There is little doubt in my mind horses give people permission to bind and mount them. They outweigh us by a lot and are highly sensitive."

In Uruguay, tack is all hand made, a kind of tribute to the gauchos' equine colleagues. One of the smaller pieces in the show is a close-up of tack alone, which Frank has painted to look like the vestments of a high priest.

Collectively, the series packs a wallop. Individually, the images are disguised self-portraits. Or, at the very least, Frank's horse paintings mark the moment she has come into her power as an artist, the result of at long last creating something very, very good - and knowing it: triumph on four legs.

Since 1970, Frank has had a black-and-white darkroom wherever she has lived. This year, she dismantled it and forced herself to sell her negative camera. Over the past few years, she took seven Photoshop classes at Ah Haa and now, thanks to digital technology, shoots largely in color.

"My horse series is the first time I have managed to marry my love of color with a subject I know and love. I am out of my head, working from my heart. There is a good reason 'art' is embedded in 'heart.'"

Telluride Daily Planet