AN ARTIST KNOWN FOR HER VIVID FIGURATIVE PAINTING ALSO CONJURES UP BIZARRE, BIOMORPHIC FORMS
Published on October 28, 2025
by Edward M. Gómez
In his 1969 television series Civilisation and its accompanying, similarly titled book, the British art historian Kenneth Clark (1903-1983) sounded joyous when he described the emblematic, 18-foot-tall bronze candelabrum of the Abbaye de Cluny (Cluny Abbey) in east-central France as defying a commonly held notion that much medieval art feels stiff or regimented. In fact, Clark enthused, that unusual object, with its complex, rhythmic form, whose creators remain unknown today, may be seen as a work of art that unabashedly expresses a sense of delight in its own making.
To suppose that a work of art may ever be aware of its own creation, never mind feel a sense of pleasure about it, too, might sound like a bold stretch of the imagination — or now, in an era of artificial intelligence, maybe not. Still, in some works of art, a sense of fecundity that seems to flow as much from the minds and technical skills of their makers as it does, naturally, from the images, compositions, or expressions to which they give tangible form can feel inescapable or even urgent.
Such is the energy that pulses through the American artist Frances Smokowski’s exquisitely crafted, abstract drawings made with pencils on paper. In them, her ability to squeeze so much expressive range and power out of such humble materials serves as an impressive reminder of that most fundamental aspect of the most resonant works of art — the magic an artist employs in transforming paint or stone or graphite on paper or found objects or some other stuff into enduring affirmations of humanity’s unsinkable creative spirit.
“Efficacies & Aetherscapes,” Smokowski’s just-closed solo exhibition at Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York, featured two series of the artist’s strange — and distinctive — pencil-on-paper, biomorphic drawings. (Works in the exhibition, which ran from September 18 through October 25, 2025, may still be seen in its online viewing room, here. Two separate books, one documenting Smokowski’s “Efficacies” series, and the other containing her “Aetherscapes” drawings, may be purchased here.)
We first examined Smokowski’s drawings in brutjournal’s December 2023-January 2024 issue. At that time, we noted that she is probably best known for her figurative works and that she developed her skills as a painter as a student at the New York Academy of Art following her studies in the field of art therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Today, Smokowski (Instagram: @francessmokowski) is based in the riverside town of Ossining, New York, north of New York City, where she shares a home and studio spaces with her partner, the artist Ernest Burden III, whose work includes architectural renderings, fantasy architecture, and other kinds of imagery.
Boasting some rich art-historical affinities — Ruth Asawa’s voluminous, looped-wire sculptures; the contemporary Dutch artist Kinke Kooi’s voluptuous, bulbous forms (Instagram: @kinkekooi); Yoko Ono’s abstract, ink-on-paper “Franklin Summer” drawings, which she started making in the 1990s and has often referred to as her “dot drawings” — Smokowski’s biomorphic drawings are wonderfully bizarre.
Remarkably, for several years, she actually produced these finely detailed, seemingly ethereal images while commuting to Manhattan by train or car.
About these pictures of mysterious vegetal growths and otherworldly viscera, whose thickets of pods and sacs churn in rhythmic compositions or float more gently and individually against plain, white backgrounds, Smokowski told us, “Both the ‘Efficacies,’ which I made in 2017, and the ‘Aetherscapes,’ which I started making in 2023 and are an ongoing series, are small works on paper, drawn completely in graphite.”
Making these works, she said, “has involved producing organic, energetic forms in deep states of meditation.” She added, “Nothing [about them] is literal. These are not illustrations. They are improvised, unplanned, spontaneous creations that present a very personal vision.”
About the 32 drawings in the “Efficacies” series, Smokowski noted that they “were drawn at home while I recovered from a concussion, marking the end of my previous productivity drawing [during my] public-transit commutes.” Cavin-Morris first introduced some of Smokowski’s drawings in a 2023 group exhibition titled “Edgewalkers,” in which some of her early “Aetherscapes” images were featured. (Twenty-four of them were included in her just-presented Cavin-Morris solo exhibition. Three of her “Efficacies” drawings were acquired by the College of Psychic Studies in London for its permanent collection.)
Considering the precision of Smokowski’s mark-making and the organic unity of each of her compositions, some viewers might assume that she begins each new drawing by making some preliminary rough sketches or, at the very least, some simple doodles to lay out the basic form a new image could take. In fact, she explained, she never starts out that way; instead, each new drawing emerges spontaneously and organically, without planning.
Smokowski said, “I have various routines I use to clear my mind and then I jump into the work with no preconceptions. On rare occasions, I might have a mind’s-eye vision of a place to start but I have never had a vision of a whole, completed image for these biomorphic works, even though I have had such downloads for my figurative works. My biomorphic pieces develop as I draw — by impulse, intuition, and focused attention to the flow and rhythms manifesting in the drawing process itself.”
We were curious about the titles Smokowski had chosen for each of her series of biomorphic images. About them, she explained, “The term ‘Efficacies’ dropped into my awareness while I was drawing, near the end of the series. I had been thinking about how each of the drawings catalyzed a palpable state shift I [had] experienced as [though] bringing [forward] an improvement in my post-concussion condition. I drew daily and experienced feeling better after drawing than [I did] before [drawing], and the improvements lasted. I used to joke about the drawing process being my medicine, and likened it to daily vitamins. Clinically, an effective treatment is called ‘efficacious,’ so these are my ‘efficacies,’ my effective healing tools or process.”
The term “aetherscapes” also came to her while Smokowski was working on her drawings in a meditative state. She recalled, “I noticed how these images were [like] fields. They felt etheric, dynamic, in flux, airy. Some felt like vistas, and others like closer views of dynamic movements and changes going on — like the ‘ethers’ of spiritual, energetic realms.”
About this perception of what she was creating and her art-making experience, Smokowski observed, “I wasn’t imagining. I was journeying, discovering, unfolding energy, and feeling enhanced and bolstered by each drawing session.” Like landscape images of the ineffable, the artist’s emerging compositions felt what she described as “etheric in nature.” Mixing up the spellings of the words “aesthetic” and “ether,” she coined the name “Aetherscapes” for her more recent, still-in-progress drawings series, the making of which she has compared to a kind of “spiritual practice.”
After all, Smokowski noted, when she makes her drawings, she is “not in an ego state or a cognitive process” in which she finds herself referring consciously or purposefully to particular subjects or source materials. She said, “I go with he flow and witness what unfolds. That said, I have a deep love of medieval manuscripts, including books about medicinal herbs, and I’ve long been fascinated by Enlightenment-era cabinets of curiosities but I don’t look at either or gather references for my drawing.”
She added, “I just draw without judgment or preconception. I wonder in an open-ended way and I’m rewarded with the awe that comes from encountering the never-before-seen or imagined.”
There’s a sense of delight percolating in this inventive artist’s keen awareness of her creative process. Call it a sense of joy, too, an animating energy that oozes irrepressibly from the enigmatic images she conjures up from somewhere deep in the psyche.
