Frank Kallop
Frank Kallop is an American artist whose natural artistic evolution has developed through several different styles of painting.
In all his work, Frank’s focus is on the visual poetry of light and space, the mystery of shadow and a palpable sense of atmosphere. Investigating direct and indirect techniques, he strives to synthesize the two methods. Frank would rather not use any labels to explain his work and prefers to hear what others have to say about it. None the less, he is displaying many recognized styles of his art on this website: Surrealism & Symbolism, Still Life, Plein Air Landscapes, Portraits, and Figure Paintings.
Frank earned a BFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978. He had been painting in the Surrealistic manner most of his life, tapping into his unconscious mind, bringing that to his consciousness and remaining poised on that razor’s edge for the duration of a painting. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, he worked automatically, in effect, to allow the painting to reveal itself outside of his deliberate control of the process.
Then something new happened; figures began to appear spontaneously in Frank’s work.
In reaction to the new element, he made a deliberate move toward Symbolism and began to consciously orchestrate his paintings, even to the point of making preparatory drawings and collages. Although the figures had been working very well within the context of his art, he wanted to make a conscious shift — to take a new direction — toward Realism.
Frank went on to receive rigorous training in figure drawing, painting and traditional illusionist techniques at the New York Academy of Art, where he earned an MFA in Painting in 2001.
The natural progression of his work has led Frank from surrealism to symbolism to realism, and now full circle back to surrealism.
Frank continues to practice “illusionist representations,” and when working in this tradition he’s able to focus his concentration like a meditation—although he also calls it “an excellent way to work on my chops.”
“Quite apart from his technical virtuosity, Frank Kallop’s work moves us because he is a visionary.
A visionary is someone who reaches deeply into the archetypal field to receive and embody universal energies. And a successful visionary is one who returns, as Kallop has, bearing artifacts from that region which connect, deepen and gift us all.”
-James Hollis
Jungian analyst and author of Finding
Meaning in the Second Half of Life.
Art can make us think…it can inspire us…it can enlighten us…it can challenge us – by illustrating an image or an idea in a new, sometimes “better” way.
Painting is a solitary work, but Frank’s exploration of archetypal metaphysical themes and symbols and the formal qualities of paint, offers us a common language through which to ponder the universal questions about who we are, how we are interconnected and how meaning is bound to relationship.
Exploring eternal themes — the spiritual quest, time, suffering, dreams, regret, irony, joy, illusion and others — Frank’s paintings illuminate.