BROOKLYN, NY.- The Kingsborough Art Museum announced its new exhibition, Time & Tide: Paintings by Frank Lind. Coinciding with the Kingsborough’s annual Eco-Festival, the show brings together Lind’s wondrous explorations of local seascapes with his Sea Level series, which addresses the devastating effects of climate change. Over twenty paintings are on view, including large-scale paintings and related studies.
A native of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Frank Lind came to New York in 1971 after graduating from Georgetown University. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, where he later served as Chair of the Fine Arts Department (1991-99), as well as Acting Dean and Dean of the School of Art and Design (1999-2009). His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions nationwide, including solo shows at Brown University (RI), Tenri Art Center (NY), and Galerie 240 (Ottawa).
The paintings of Frank Lind invite us to delve into New York’s hidden seaside spots, to truly notice the details that shape this solitary but satisfying experience. Through his seascapes we are offered a glimpse of the life hidden from our immediate, casual vision: the mermaid hair grass and clumps of barnacles affixed to rocks, waiting for high tide; the interplay of colored rocks lying along the littoral; the beguiling ballet of gulls harvesting their breakfast from the unsuspecting crustaceans in the morning surf.
The impressive scale of his paintings parallels the importance Lind sees in this close reading of experience. Like his nineteenth-century predecessors—Frederick Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran—Frank Lind elevates the status of landscape by drawing us into the details of his vast canvases. At the same time, other passages may remind the viewer of seascapes by Gustave Courbet or Claude Monet, or cloud studies by John Constable. Lind’s deliberately limited ten-color palette, adopted from that employed by the artist James Perry Wilson (1889-1976), belies the complexity of his compositions while presenting a unique style that underlies an equally inimitable vision.
Lind’s seascapes are both a paean and a warning, however. Rising sea levels caused by global climate change are depicted in his Sea Level series, a number of which are on view in this exhibition (such as his triptych Tilden Barracks Red, Fig. 2). Much like the French painter Hubert Robert (1733-1808), who painted futuristic scenes of the Louvre in ruins, Lind presents us with the devastating effects of global warming here in Brooklyn. Several of the works show the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which occurred during the period of the series. The exhibition also offers a glimpse at the artist’s process through a number of studies for the larger paintings on view. The evident changes from study to finished work reveal solutions to artistic problems that occur in the transition between the two scales—-important object lessons for Kingsborough’s Fine Arts and Graphic Design students.
Time & Tide also celebrates the donation of two large-scale works, Discobolus and Maestro (both 1997, o/c, 80 x 60 inches), to Kingsborough Community College for its permanent art collection. These companion paintings, thematically relevant to the college’s location, will undoubtedly become an integral part of the campus experience for generations of students and faculty to follow.
