AN ARTIST KNOWN FOR HER REALIST, FIGURATIVE WORK REVELS IN THE CONJURING UP OF STRANGE, SENSUOUS FORMS

by Edward M. Gómez

Let’s all raise our hands and shout in praise for the blob, the bulb, the beanbag, and the balloon. Let’s celebrate unstoppably organic growths, serpentine scribbles, pods and orifices, bulges and bubbles, and audacious protuberances of all kinds. Let’s hear it for voluptuous curves and sensuous strings of ectoplasmic goo.

Welcome to the biomorphic drawings of the artist Frances Smokowski, a painter who is perhaps best known for her vivid figurative works, in which she depicts the human form with an attention to detail that is typical of Renaissance portraits. Smokowski was born and brought up in the western part of upstate New York and studied art therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (enthusiastically but at first somewhat unwittingly, for, thanks to a bureaucratic, paper-shuffling mishap in the school’s admissions office, her application to enter its painting program was misplaced, prompting her to seize upon another study program’s last-minute opening).