American painter Larry Frank has previously trained as a photographer, giving him a sharp sensitivity to light that shines in his impressionist oil compositions. His portraits, figure paintings and landscapes, though rooted in realism and a keen awareness of art history, possess an almost otherworldly brilliance. Sharp details of facial features and dark tones in wooded vistas emerge from a bold palette of pale greens, yellows and blues. The powerful light that Frank conveys in his thick, gestural brushstrokes pushes his paintings towards abstraction in pieces that very vividly evoke Cézanne.
The sun-filled aesthetic that characterizes most of his canvases conveys not only a sense of warmth, but also a mood of optimism, even jubilance. His thick daubs of darker blues, reds, purples and blacks, set amidst white-hot hues, attain a kind of weightlessness, a powerful and captivating sense of being charged and unpredictable. By shining such strong light onto his subjects, Frank very nearly literally sets them ablaze and lends them an incredible new energy.