The art of painting has fascinated me since childhood . As a kid , I played around with enamel model paint to color in drawings copied from comic books . Soon , experimenting with poster paint , acrylic then oil .
I attempted to render imagery by copying details from various painters ' work . Naturally , these experiments yielded lousy results as I was completely uneducated in the craft of painting .
When I was ten years old , my parents took me to see Norman Rockwell ' s 60 year retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum . I was overwhelmed by Rockwell ’ s ability to render the natural world in paint .
Everything seemed to matter to him . Equal attention was paid to the human form , clothing and objects , as it was to a crushed out cigarette butt on the floor of a diner , which he carefully studied and rendered .
After that day , I knew that I wanted to become a painter . Not just a painter , but an explorer of the craft and history of the painters that informed the works of Rockwell and others . Later , discovering the works of other modern painters opened my eyes to the infinite variety of styles and techniques that could be used to render forms . Further exploration taught me that forms could be painted as abstracted shapes as I studied the works of Franz Kline , Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg , to name a few . Their work demonstrated how a painter ' s marks can emote and thrill a viewer with just color and brushwork alone .
Image Details , title page : Kevin Frank , Subway Entrance , encaustic on wood panel , 14 x 11 inches , 2004