The focus on toys and material popular culture has become the subject matter in the art of such well-known artists, like Jeff Coons, and Takashi Murakami. In recent years, the painter Frank Trankina, an SAIC alumni (MFA 1992) and current associate professor of art at Northern Illinois University has also adopted this subject matter in his very skillful and quite impressive observational paintings, still lifes of vintage toys.
On Saturday afternoon, October 9, 2010, Trankina gave a talk about his still life paintings on display at the Packer Schopf Gallery in the West Loop.
The talk was scheduled on the Fulton Market District annual open studio arts walk. Aron Packer, gallerist, at Packer Schopf, introduced Trankina as a painter who combines the serious and the humorous through his offbeat selection of material for his paintings.
Trankina describes himself as a still life and observational painter, who has he observes with a smile, recently has become known as the “toy painter.” Trankina for about twenty years had been a still life painter of “serious” subjects, like art materials, easels, palettes, one of which “Dilemma” (2006) is on display at the show. Thus, he has recently shifted his choice of subject matter to one that involves a much stronger sense of narrative.
To begin his talk, Trankina briefly discusses each painting, beginning with “Homage to Ray Ushida”, a former, long-time faculty member at SAIC (1959-2005), who was Trankina’s instructor while he was a graduate student at SAIC. Trankina later became Ushida’s friend, and fellow collector in search of still life objects to paint. In “Homage” Trankina includes a painting of a postcard that Ushida sent to him, and a small Hula girl figurine, which Ushida had lent him, but which Trankina unexpectedly ended up keeping, since Ushida passed away on January 10, 2009.
Almost all of Trankina’s paintings feature one or several toys or figurines, mostly old, set up on a shelf with different varieties of wooden boards, which serve as a background. Thus, the still life setup itself is like a small theatre stage on which the viewer has a stage seat. Appropriately, the series of paintings is called “Wall Tales and Shelf Stories.”
For the sake of searching for objects for his still life paintings, Trankina has become a collector of them during his travels and while shopping. Searching for still life objects at flea markets was an activity that Trankina pursued at times with Ushida.
The title of each of Trankina’s paintings implies a story. “Faust”, for example, alludes to the mythical Faust, who made a pact with the devil for eternal life. When Faust changed his mind, he became mortal and aged.
The toy head on a block of wood that represents Faust is a somewhat comic looking human head, starting to decompose that Trankina found in a Walmart sale bin. What makes the head disturbing is the manner in which it is set up on a shelf, an unexpected formal presentation that is creators never likely envisioned for it.
In another painting named “Line Up” Trankina simply did not paint the heads on three figurines of varying size and style and a small bust, an unlikely looking group to expect to see in a line up. The dark humor here lies in the fact that the differences are so great among the figures that we actually could recognize them without their heads.
After talking about most of his paintings, Trankina answers questions from the audience. He talks about the challenge of observational oil painting, like figuring out how paint plywood convincingly, or how blending a color make take hours of effort.
Trankina compares the painter’s relation to his or painting as a personal relationship. Initially, it is full of excitement and feels like a honeymoon when starting the painting, but as work continues on the painting, it becomes more challenging and complex, as does any long term relationship or marriage.
Some of Trankina’s influences include the aesthetic of modernist abstraction, notably the painter Piet Mondrian, who uses vertical and horizontal lines in his works. Trankina usually composes his paintings with vertical and horizontal planes, and only an occasional diagonal.
Trankina took an interest in nineteenth-century American still-life painting, after having been shown a book about by Ushida on the subject. The American painter, John Peto, in particular caught Trankina’s eye. In the exhibit, Trankina’s trompe l’oeil (fool the eye) painting “Pictures -- What are They?” with its photos and frame and reproduction tacked to a wall echoes Peto’s painted wall displays.
Trankina wanted to become an abstract painter, but he became an observational one, who in his most recent paintings sets up seemingly amusing and innocuous toys and objects of Americana on a surreal stage that no one had ever imagined they could be seen.
