dale frank | 'The Days Past Quicklyas If He Had Nothing To Anticipate, 2011' | 160x120cm

Code: DDDF11001

Artist: dale frank

Title: The Days Past Quicklyas If He Had Nothing To Anticipate

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 160x120cm

Year: 2011

Dale Frank works with poured varnish and pigment, letting gravity and chemistry do much of the composing. The result here is a surface that feels both liquid and permanent. Emerald pools sit against buttery cream. A red form pushes up through the centre like a figure caught mid dissolve.

The title reads like a fragment from a novel. It carries the melancholy of time slipping past a person who has stopped waiting for anything. That mood soaks into the paint. The greens run heavy at the edges. The pale expanses in the lower half feel exposed, almost skinlike, marked by drips and small pockmarks where the varnish has beaded.

Frank is one of Australia's most distinctive contemporary painters. He built his reputation on canvases that refuse easy reading. They hover between abstraction and something almost figurative, where a face or a body seems to surface then sink back into the flow. Look long enough at this work and shapes begin to suggest themselves. A head bowed. A shoulder. A hand reaching across the lower register in a streak of coral and grey.

The scale matters. At this size the painting becomes an environment rather than an image. You stand inside its weather. The gloss finish holds the room in its reflection, so the viewer is folded into the piece.

There is real emotional weight here beneath the technical bravado. Frank uses beauty as a lure. What he delivers underneath is closer to unease. A portrait of time, perhaps. Or of a man who has run out of it.