Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1972

Frank Veteran

I started drawing at the Art Students League of New York, and my first paintings were figurative. All my studies were done from the model, in charcoal, not the full figure, but details, commingling the figurative and abstract. I thought of this as an almost basic grammatical way forward. I trained myself to paint, from figure to abstraction. All the work is connected logically in my mind, from one step to another: a blank canvas starts with a mark, and that mark dictates another, a process I liken to following a string in the dark, leading you home. I tend to work in series.

Having trained as a surgeon, I realized that surgery can be seen as a basic form of abstraction. The operating field, frame and scale, are walled off from the patient as a whole and surgery proceeds, layer by layer, much as a canvas and scale are chosen to initiate the making of a mark and the subsequent marks that follow through action/reaction and my visual cognitive logic. I don't deny the surgical influence on my way of seeing. This ultimately represents a process of destruction and construction, leading toward unity.

I started photography as a teenager and began to paint in my thirties. My photos are a mix of documentation, formal composition, and abstraction in the everyday. Photography and painting are commingled in my mind as a way of seeing.