The Artist: Natalie Frank on art, inspiration and the female voice in fairy tales
By Eva Kahn
Natalie Frank is a visual artist and Austin native who has studied all over the world. Exhibitions featuring her work have been held nationally and internationally. She is a strong-minded advocate for women artists in a traditionally male-dominated field. She’s also the artist whose series of drawings on the Brothers Grimm fairy tales inspired Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills to pursue GRIMM TALES, a new world-premiere dance work, featuring grown-up retellings of The Frog King, Snow White, and The Juniper Tree.
We recently sat down with Frank to discuss her inspirations, secret desires, and the process of making professional wishes come true.
What first led you to paint?
I think I was probably 12 or 13 when I went to my first figure drawing class, and because I was so young, my mom went with me. It was held in a woman’s garage in Dallas and it was a group of more than 60 older women who would gather in this garage and draw from the nude model two times a week. Immediately I was gone! I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
How has your education shaped your work as an artist?
I knew I wanted to study art but also have a general B.A. in education, so I went to Yale for undergraduate. I studied art history, economics, literature, and really took only few art classes because I wanted to access a wide breadth of subjects.
I had a wonderful head of college there who gave me awards, which just meant as much money as I wanted to travel anywhere in the world and to go to different art schools and visit paintings in different museums, and that really changed my life.
Artists have been interpreting the Brothers Grimm fairy tales in a variety of ways for decades. What made you want to explore these stories?
I started working from works of literature about seven years ago. I had been visiting Paula Rego (Portuguese-born visual artist) in her studio in London. We were talking about what we were reading and what we were wanting to draw, and she said, “you should really look at the ‘Grimms’; no one has illustrated them en masse.”
When I read the text, a lot of the narrative figuration, the color, and how the figures should be arranged kind of sprung to mind. Doing these drawings started out as a fun pastime, but those were figure drawings, not pieces of art. I’ve never shown drawings, I’m a painter. What I really wanted to do was to make a book, so I began to put together this Grimm book. That set off my path on working with literature. This area — feminist fairy telling — an artist really hasn’t captured that. And now I work exclusively from literature and work in drawing and don’t paint anymore.
I think why I was drawn and have been drawn to books is the idea of taking something that’s in your head and making an immersive environment out of it. And what could be more immersive than a whole stage with sets, costumes, you know a whole production? It’s a whole world.
You were born in Austin, Texas. What’s it like to have a collaboration of this scale — one that involves performing artists from the fields of dance, music, costume and set design — come together and premiere on stage in your hometown?
The show at the Drawing Center (N.Y.) in 2015 traveled to the Blanton Museum of Art. I think, growing up in Austin and coming to the ballet, I’ve just always admired dancers and choreographers. To meet Stephen and become acquainted with his work, it was just such an unexpected surprise when he asked if I would have any interest in doing a ballet with him because making a ballet, making an opera, and making a book are three of my secret desires. It’s wonderful to have that wish come true.
The ability to bring small 22-by-30-inch drawings to life on a scale of this size is pretty mind-blowing and a little bit scary! Stephen…maybe it was an intelligent ploy, but he let me pick my collaborators. The people I’m working with have had 30-40 years of experience on me. The most successful way and the most generative way to work in those situations is to listen and to let other people’s experience drive things. It’s a collaboration and I’m going into their fields — can we find a way to translate my hand into their expertise?
Stephen has allowed us all to really do our thing, to explore, to invent, which I think is really rare in collaborations.
What inspirations or influences are you drawing on for your work on this ballet?
The experiences that have been the most meaningful to me have been the mentors I’ve found along the way. Whether it started with that woman in the garage who was leading those classes, the head of my college at Yale, meeting Paula Rego, women in New York; people, most of whom have been women, have really meant the most to me, and I think developed my work most significantly.
The Grimm stories were never intended for children, they were intended as cautionary tales about what life was really like and what’s most interesting to me is that they began as women’s oral tales. Women all around Germany collected these stories for centuries at the time of the Brothers Grimm, who wrote them down and changed them for “poetics.”
So these tales have been kind of adapted and played with, with an eye toward different power relationships through the years based on who is shaping them — usually, men taking out the parts that are threatening to them about women’s power.
I tried in the way that I drew these stories to kind of reclaim some of that power for the women, and I did that through showing characters that were evil and taking pleasure in that and not casting them necessarily as villainesses.
You’ve said that your take on these tales is not saccharine or “Disney-esque.” How have you and the collaborators chosen to portray a modern take on these stories?
I know we have talked about the role of women, we’ve talked about the idea of hunger, running through the three stories we chose. We’re starting with The Frog King. It’s light. It’s funny. But it’s about sexual hunger, and it’s a story where the woman inflicts violence and physical aggression on the man, who’s the frog. Snow White, we all found pretty interesting because of the hunger for youth, the struggle between the older woman, the evil queen, and Snow White. We focus on the evil queen because we all find her a little more interesting as a character. And then we finish with The Juniper Tree, which is a tale about literal hunger. The stepmother decapitates the little boy and then cooks him and serves him to the father for dinner, who eats him greedily. Ultimately at the end, everyone is given gifts, and when she comes out to get her gift, she gets decapitated.
Now that the creation process is underway, you’ve had to create some new designs that are compatible with set pieces and costumes. How are these different from your original drawings?
I’m working with George Tsypin for the set design and I’ve been doing more than 30 drawings that will be projected onto scrims. The idea of approaching these drawings is radically different from how I approach my work. I’m so used to centering my drawings around a figure and with these projections, the figure is the dancers — the figure is already there. You don’t want to steal the dancer’s thunder or distract from the beautiful movement of the dancer, so I’ve been learning how to make drawings that leave room for other bodies in real space and time.
With Constance Hoffman, who’s designing the costumes, we’re looking at translating the way I paint into a garment with texture, lightness, and fluidity.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
There’re so many men who are telling honest stories with respect and dignity for everyone. I don’t think of it as “a man telling a woman’s story.” I think the voice needs to be fair and open and responsible, and Stephen is that person. All the collaborators working on this are those people. It’s been a huge gift to be able to take on this performance.
