Bulletin board--Casper, Wyoming 1956

Robert Frank captured this bulletin board in Casper, Wyoming with his camera, a medium that, like painting, can freeze a moment in time. This image, like a painter's canvas, is packed with information, a collage of found images and objects. I imagine Frank, like a painter, choosing his composition, framing the world in his viewfinder. What was he thinking when he snapped this shot? Was it the contrast between the high art of ballet on TV and the everyday ephemera of the bulletin board? Or maybe the tension between the smiling portrait of Eisenhower and the more ominous stack of figurines? There is a particular pleasure in the physicality of painting, the way the brush moves across the canvas, the way colors mix and blend. Photography offers a different kind of materiality, capturing the textures and surfaces of the world with light and shadow. Both, however, show a way of seeing. Artists are always in dialogue with each other across time. Frank’s photograph, with its layered imagery and ambiguous narrative, inspires me, as a painter, to embrace uncertainty and explore the many possibilities of representation.