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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 37, Number 9. 1st May 1974

Robert Franken Drawing Beyond the Imagnation

page 9

Robert Franken Drawing Beyond the Imagnation

Photo of Robert Franken

You don't have to make an effort to look at Robert Franken's pictures. They glare out of the glass at you, you see yourself reflected in the glass and are drawn, figuratively and literally, into the picture.

But to go beyond the staring is the difficult part. There is a temptation to dismiss Franken's work as the after hours indulgences of a zoology illustrator who has read too much science fiction. Only when you learn that his drawing is his life, that he lives in an environment like the fantasy world of the drawings, that what's going on in his head is more like a non-stop surrealistic film than like the vague ideas that keep most of us ticking over, and that Robert Franken has been living and drawing with his brilliance for years now, do you realise that he is an artist in the truest sense.

There is a temptation to dismiss Franken's work as being unrelated to social reality and unintelligible to ordinary human beings. But they are intelligible to everybody at some level, usually beginning with visual fascination. Often they take the viewer at least some distance on a journey of self-examination.

As far as relation to everyday life goes, Franken insists that he is very much aware of what is going on 'out there' and that his works certainly relate to people's lives. It remains for the viewer to decide in what way.

Probably we will only be able to fully evaluate Robert Franken when he has realised his ambition to work with film, for his drawings are only the stills that he manages to draw from the vivid stream of his imagination. In film he would combine their compelling visual quality with the weird, unreal stories that worm in and out of his brain. But to make such films would be unprecedented in New Zealand, and would be costly. He needs support.......

—R.W.S.

"Just a little in common" showing duck type figures

Below: "Just a little in common" (1973).

"Lots of my things are protests, not about society's problems but about ways of thinking, about what's going on inside the peoples heads. These axe important things."

"People looking at my work, if they don't want to say anything, or if they can't see the whole work, they say 'Oh, its complicated' or 'Oh, look at all the detail'. Or they look for an element they can recognise, like a frog, which they think is a nice animal. But what is wrong with a tapeworm?"

"I tend to think in continuous pictures rather then words. Each drawing I do could be one image, or it could be a whole story. Some people could not live with themselves if they thought in pictures."