cynthia van frank

Lest We Forget- About My Mother–a series of paintings about my 92-year-old mother, dementia, memory loss, memory keeping, and love.

In my mother's generation, those who survived the Holocaust are now old, many are victims of the ravages of memory loss. It falls on the second-generation survivors, and their children, to keep their memories alive. This series of paintings recalls my mother’s experience as a survivor and as my mother. It speaks as much about her as it does about the universal experience of facing our mortality. In the paintings, I use objects as an archaeologist might, observing and piecing together my mother’s life.

My series of small oil paintings captures the essence of my mother’s life and journey with dementia. It is a tribute to her and also an exploration of my experience as her caregiver. Several paintings show objects from her life and include reflections on their importance in her journey with dementia. Objects carry memories and meanings, often becoming the only testament to a person's life. The style of the work is what I call emotional realism.

Throughout her life, my mother faced numerous challenges, including as a hidden child during World War II, resulting in a struggle with introversion and subservience. As I grew older, we developed a deep bond, and she found her voice after my father passed away. Unfortunately, her memories began to slip away, and she was diagnosed with dementia. This experience has been both heartbreaking and illuminating, forcing me to confront my own mortality and the fragility of memory.

With these paintings, I hope to preserve my mother’s memories in a tangible form, offering a glimpse into her life and experiences before they disappear. The objects depicted in the paintings are touchstones that connect my mother to her past. They symbolize the richness of her life despite the challenges posed by dementia.

Each narrative accompanying the paintings reflects my reactions to the objects and memories that my mother holds dear. They explore themes of love, loss, and memory. Knitting is a constant thread throughout the series, symbolizing comfort and routine. One painting, in particular, portrays a poignant moment in my mother’s life. She unraveled the sweater she had knitted for my father and used the yarn to knit a sweater for herself. This painting is a tribute to my mother’s resilience and resourcefulness, as well as a reflection of the enduring power of love and memory.

Throughout I use the same colour, a neutral Naples Yellow, for each background, unifying the series as a cohesive whole. The presence of shadows in each painting serves as a subtle reminder of the fragility of memory and the ever-present threat of dementia.

The series offers a glimpse into the complex emotions and experiences of those affected by dementia. It pays tribute to my mother’s life, confronts mortality, and celebrates the enduring power of memory and connection.

Born in Montreal on June 6, 1955, as a young child, I would gather neighbourhood kids and share my invented love story about my parents' meeting and how they survived the war. These tales involved my parents jumping from one train car to another to escape being caught by evil men. My parents, both "hidden children" during the war, never discussed this past with me, which lent an air of mystery to the imaginative tales. It felt as though I was somehow channeling the collective memory of the many people who went through the war. With dementia taking my mother's memories, we must become the keepers of the past. It is my mission to tell her story once more.

I skim through the fresh snow and on my snowshoes, almost defy gravity. I breathe in the fresh air and feel at peace. Although I am close to my home, this mountain in the center of the city offers me respite from being confined. I search for the blue long shadows hitting the snow and reaching into the landscape. When I see them, I stop and take a photograph.

These pictures become the references and springboards for my small-scale oil pastel paintings. My landscape paintings always place the viewer where I stood. The work becomes experiential and I become the stand-in for the viewer.

In my twenties, I was in the hospital for over a month. I turned to oil pastel as a medium to express my feelings of loneliness. I developed a method of scraping and tinting the paper with them. I layered colours from thin to fat. Each layer would act as a bed to support the next, and together would cause vibrating and inviting coloured scenes. I worked in a small sketchbook because I was bedridden.

Over the past thirty years, I have returned from time to time to oil pastel to create a diary of images that document my days. I remain concerned with pattern and dynamic composition. My themes of belonging, finding one’s place and sanctuary, have remained constant in my work. This past year, the pandemic created a shadow over all our lives and my small-scale landscape oil pastels provided me with solace.

My oil paintings on gallery profile wood panels describe a once industrial area of the St. Henri canal and Le Sud Ouest now in a transitional phase of gentrification. They mark specific places in time and portray the narrative of a layered history. My work addresses the Postindustrial urban landscape of Montreal. It follows in the tradition of artists like Phillip Surrey, a past neighbour, Adrien Hébert and Mabel May who depicted Montreal in their era.

My paintings play out my visual curiosity about the way the sky and light caress buildings, abandoned structures, water and land. The convergence of decaying, sometimes graffiti painted structures stands in harsh yet beautiful contrast to the sky, like monoliths glittering in the light. The series captures the struggle of man, to leave his mark on the earth – and the futility of that struggle as nature inevitably overcomes his efforts.

The transformation and entropy of the buildings and skyline depicted in this series become proxies for the human condition and eventual mortality. The surface of these paintings with their drips, layers of translucent colour and lines mimic the fragility and aging process of skin.

Last summer I had a dream where I was walking through a wild grassy field that backed onto a forest. I was carrying a wooden straight-backed chair tied to my back. This particular series of oil paintings of chairs is inspired from that dream and from an old photograph of my father lifting me high in the air. I am about three years old in the picture, and my dad is a young father. I am laughing and reveling in his attention. We are in a field of high yellow grasses. The grasses from this photograph surface in my paintings as the surround for my chairs. I try, with color and pattern in this series of paintings, to support the idea of hope.

The last time that I used a chair in my artistic practice was during my undergraduate degree

over 30 years ago. I was late joining a class exploring the theme of site specific art. Everyone

had started their installation pieces in the industrial space that was available to us. There was

very little space left. During my second day there, I placed an old wooden chair from home in a small area and painted its cast shadow on the floor. This was how I communicated the idea of

personal and shared space, which because of this experience, became very clear to me.

The chair is a loaded symbol. Many times a vacant chair means emptiness, but for me, it is a sign of hopefulness. In my paintings, I want to create a magical environment. The chair, in my paintings, is a designated proxy, sitting in a liminal space placed as if in a waiting room someplace between an interior and an exterior area. Time symbolically is suspended between memory, the present, and the future. The chairs often look like they are about to move if they could. This is how many of us live our lives. We are filled with dreams but also fears, paralyzed as we wait for the right moment to move. I feel that this is especially true during these unprecedented times of confinement. We feel stuck and afraid. I painted these images of chairs as a way to inspire hope and to remind myself about the wondrous regenerative power of nature during these troubling times. While the world is paused we have time for introspection and reflection. There are potential and opportunities for great change in this crisis. We must hold tightly the idea that we can come out of this and any other situation and move forward. To heal and succeed we need to come together, support each other across all invented borders, and set the world on a new path.

In this series, consisting of primarily oil pastel drawings on paper, I explore  our fragility and vulnerability. I look closely at skin as it is juxtaposed against the earth. Many of the solitary figures are depicted asleep on the forest floor as if in communion with their environment.

From Margaret Atwood’s book Surfacing:

 “I lean against a tree I am a tree I break out again into the bright sun and crumple, head against the ground. I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am place.”

My work through the years has evolved but there exists a constant thread running through it thematically of women and their relationship with nature.

The photo-collages based on the Rapunzel fairytale speak about transformation and a journey of inner self-development. The two figures in the collage act out the theme of self-reflection and a desire for metamorphosis. I am both the “princess” and the “knight”.

The gated garden surrounding the tower symbolizes a conflicted state of mind. It is a dark purple/ grey place full of wild textured roots, vines, brambles, pitfalls and dangers. The Knight must overcome these perils in order to rescue the princess. The knight in a battle-bloodied cloak, almost dissolves into the ground of purple/ grey, transforms into the baser earthly desires we all have and hide. The princess stands in as our higher intellectual aspirations. The fifth chakra blue tint indicates her desire to find her voice and self-expression. She reaches for the knight and the knight gazes longingly upward. They face each other. The contrasting palette of warm and cool tones suggests tension in the characters’ quest for union. The thorny grey roses present an element of danger that can cut off or cause a split in these two psychological spaces.

In the original story of Rapunzel, once the princess is rescued by the prince, they wed and have a child. Both collages retell this fairytale as a story of rescue and rebirth. Rapunzel, locked away in the tower, is the potential of the wakening consciousness. She is waiting to be saved in order to act. The witch, who put Rapunzel in the tower, is absent or invisible. I believe, however, that she is omnipresent and represents our fears and ego. We must confront our fears and ego if we are to overcome the barriers to finding our authentic self. This female gaze is one of strength communicating to the viewer that I want to be saved and I can only be rescued by myself.

As a painter, I strive to find the perfect colour that when placed on a support seems to have always been there, as in nature. The reward, when painting, is when one colour applied next to another one on the canvas seems to vibrate. It is as if this colour has a power to physically and spiritually transport me back to a memory or emotion. 

Each morning, over many summers, I would wake up to the beautiful view of Snow's Mountain in New Hampshire. These oil pastel drawings and oil paintings record the the light of this one particular view. With the slightest shift in position, my view out the window alters and with it, my composition. Some oil pastels would start with certain colours and completely transform as day turned to night or when clouds lifted over the mountain.

My oil paintings, in this series, visually play between the exterior and interior views. I move from landscape to still life excited by colour and pattern.

 My figurative work in clay usually portrays women in an introspective or passive role and many are depicted as sleeping or at rest. There is often a built-in dichotomy between the immediate humour and surreal narrative of many of these early career pieces and the underlying sense of predicament.

At the age of five or six, until my adolescence, I would gather the neighborhood kids around me and tell them the story of my parents first meetings and how they fell in love and survived the war. These tales involved my parents jumping from one train boxcar to another to escape being caught by evil men. The odd thing about these very dramatically told stories was that at that time in my young life, my parents, who were “hidden children" during the war, never talked to me about their wartime experiences. For some reason, I was channeling the collective memory of the many people who went through the war or perhaps overheard parts of conversations. I have no other idea of how I could have had any knowledge of these events. During the war my father was hidden in an orphanage. The head mistress tortured the Jewish boys living there. One hidden boy was scalded to death in a bath as a punishment. Of the thirty-nine Jewish boys who started out there within a short time only two were left. One was my father. My mother was hidden in a convent and remembers going up to the roof and watching "fireworks " in the sky. She remembers after the war the feeling of guilt as the Pope unconverted thousands of Jewish children. Both my parents lost their parents during the war. My husband's parents survived the war but spent the war years as teenagers in Auschwitz. I felt compelled as a visual artist to express our families’ heritage. This project is based primarily on photographs found by concentration camp survivor, Lili Jacobin in an Auschwitz bunker and on transit sheets from the Nazi’s Belgium Book of the Jewish Deported. These transit sheets documented my grandparents’ deportation to the death camps. This series of images are graphite drawings on large plywood sheets of wood. Wood represents a once living thing. The graphite burnishes or tattoos my secondhand memories onto the wood support.