Vagabond City Artist Feature

Hey, cool thing! A few of my drawings were featured in the January issue of Vagabond City, an online magazine that publishes art, prose, and reviews that fall outside the mainstream literary scene.

Their art editor, Catherine, asked me some questions about my relationship to art and my process. Here’s the link for the article on the website. I’ll also include the interview transcript below. Enjoy!

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Taking notice of the “small, in-between moments often overlooked in our daily lives,” Frances Jane’s drawings feature dappled light and dramatic shadows cast upon bold, architectural line work. The distinctive use of ink and careful rendering of textures reflects a diligent attention to detail and a reverence for “people and places that mainstream forces don’t acknowledge.”

Tell us a bit about yourself; how long have you been making art?

I started drawing in 2018. I was an artsy kid, but I pushed that aside as I grew up, avoiding hobbies or anything that would confirm my so-called “inherent” femininity. I was so afraid that if I told people I made art, then the “ahhh” feeling would come over them, like I made sense to them. As a queer person, I think I always wanted to challenge that in other people. But before I knew I was queer, it came at the expense of myself and my true desires/interests. I preferred their “oh!” reaction when I said I played Guitar Hero religiously, loved Stephen King, or that I drove a 1976 Jeep CJ7–all true (we were all young once!), but I was only living out one side of the story. So I stopped drawing for a while.

Fast forward to 2018. I sat down and wanted to test whether my childhood skills were still there. They were.

You have a very distinct style of capturing architecture and the surrounding environment. What would you consider to be some of your biggest influences?

Because I don’t necessarily see myself as an illustrator, most of my influences come from other mediums. Mitchell Johnson is an incredible painter whose work is teaching me how to see color and value. I’m also totally captivated by Julie Blackmon, a photographer from the Midwest whose compositions convey tension through the careful placement of ordinary objects. I believe in the power of repetition, slowly absorbing things over time, so I return to their work a lot.

What draws you to this particular subject matter?

I used to ask people “What should I draw?” all the time. There’s a lot of desperation and need in that question because I couldn’t answer it myself. So later, in my early 20s, I started drawing houses and scenes in my neighborhood simply because those were close by. It became a meditative practice when I was deeply depressed, a way to say, “I exist and all these places exist, too.” Drawing was my way to find meaning and place artistic value on small, in-between moments often overlooked in our daily lives, and houses became my container to capture them. Chipped paint, neglected garden beds, crumbling bricks – I felt like I could relate to those scenes more than I could the people around me, and definitely more than I could relate to grandiose skylines or monuments. We don’t often stop to regard a tipped-over flowerpot, or a lone shovel tossed on the front lawn. We turn it upright, or move the shovel to the garage, or the shed, or whatever. I want to challenge people to see art in scenes where others might see a function, or a directive. I want to draw things that other people might want to “tidy up.” I want to say that there is power in people and places that mainstream forces don’t acknowledge.

You’ve mentioned that you view ink as a “binary medium” and that your “use of ink is a reflection of [your] relationship to art making and living.” Would you describe your process?

For sure. I’m surprised by how many people, mainly fellow visual artists, especially painters, express awe or anxiety about the fact that ink is my medium. It really is a 0-1 medium. Each individual dot or line is fully pigmented, surrounded by negative space, and once it’s there, it’s there. There’s no covering it up; only adapting. I had to embrace this “limitation” of ink, and at the same time embrace what I saw as limitations in myself. For example, I can’t draw a straight line. Some people can. It was frustrating trying to draw buildings with this mindset, so I said screw it, and released myself from the responsibility of rendering buildings as I truly saw them. My practice began to include my “wavy” lines. In this sense, I can’t extract my style from my process, because the way I draw is informed by the way I think about my capabilities as an artist.

In a simpler sense, I take walks, snap pictures of places that have interesting compositions, and then go home and try my best.

That being said, I love painters. I have no idea how they do what they do.

What’s next for you? Is there anything else you’d like to further explore with your art?

I still take house portrait commissions. I’m also drawing on a larger scale, which for me is 9×12” drawings. With that comes a lot of room, or maybe a necessity, to experiment more with gradients. I’m also reflecting on my body of work and focusing on the elements that I do best, like tree trunks and buildings with flat facades.

Additionally, this summer I started folding strips of gorgeous, handmade paper into origami mats. I’m eager to explore the ways I can create visual paintings using many different types of paper in one mat. I still need practice seeing color and value at the same time, which I’m doing with this medium. Mitchell Johnson said that he doesn’t paint chairs, he turns chairs into paintings, which was an “ah-ha” moment for me in thinking about my work. I’m not making things, but translating things, objects, and moods into art using specific mediums as a translator. I’m still developing language for what I’m striving for, but in the meantime, I tell myself I’m making paintings with paper.