FRANCES SMOKOWSKI’S OTHER WORLDS: ENTER THE MYSTERIOUS SPACES OF THE “EFFICACIES” AND THE “AETHERSCAPES”

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.

Frances Smokowski, “Nurture,” from the “Efficacies” series, 2017, graphite on toned paper, 7 x 5 inches (17.78 x 12.7 centimeters). Photo courtesy of the artist

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.