Artist
Frank Webster
(b. 1966)
I embark on the voyage of seeing by actively engaging with the earth—traversing its surface and transcribing its nuances by hand. I sketch out a vast terrain, humbled by its timeless reality.
— Frank Webster
Frank Webster is a devout chronicler of natural history. His numerous works capture the ephemeral and fragile qualities of our planet, simultaneously rendering us awestruck by their grandeur and sublime power. An intrepid and devoted explorer of the otherworldly, Webster bears witness through each brushstroke, exploring themes of memory, transformation, isolation, and melancholic yet rapturous experiences with landscapes.
Having completed his MFA at Rutgers University, Webster’s thesis explored the paradigmatic shift from romantic science to Darwinism through the lens of some of the artists in the Hudson River School. His earliest work maintains a certain stillness found also in his later work. American scenes are transformed by the artist into pure explorations of light, shape, and form, and otherwise everyday spaces such as gas stations, corner stores, or metropolitan skylines are distilled into atmospheric, chromatically centered depictions.
In more recent years, after completing expeditions and residencies on Svalbard, an archipelago in Norway, and in the Burren in County Clare, Ireland, Webster’s work has come full circle to his initial artistic explorations. He has created a new visual and thematic vocabulary, a true successor of plein air painting and the philosophical and artistic traditions and practices of the 18th and 19th centuries. As our relationship with nature and our surroundings have become less symbiotic, Webster has tirelessly sought to document and record this evolution. Deeply personal though tethered to humanity, his works are intimate and experiential, placing mankind in a position of self-awareness as mere visitors in some of the most ethereal pockets on the planet. Webster recognizes that it is imperative to capture and record these landscapes by human hand, and not by machine. His paintings are precious yet evocative respite from the overly populated and pillaged planet we inhabit. Webster reminds us that glaciers, stone, and humans all co-exist, and call the same planet home.
Frank Webster was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Some of the residencies he has been granted include the Arctic Circle Residency, Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland, the NES Artist Residency in Iceland, The Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn. He has participated in many group and solo exhibitions at museums and galleries, such as the Zimmerli Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Steffany Martz Gallery, the Parrish Art Museum, Blackston Gallery, and many others. In early 2022, Webster was commissioned to execute The Stone—a monumental Icelandic landscape—by the Durst Organization for the library for the newly constructed SVEN residential project in Long Island City, New York. Webster currently lives and works in Queens, New York.
