Most painters look at a coffee cup and paint a coffee cup. Zoey Frank looks at a coffee cup and paints the specific way light is falling across its surface at that exact moment. The distinction sounds subtle. In practice, it changes everything about how a painting gets built.
Frank is a representational oil painter based in Colorado whose work spans still life, interiors, and multi-figure compositions. She trained for four years in classical atelier methods under Juliette Aristides at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle before earning her MFA from the Laguna College of Art and Design. Her paintings hang in galleries including Galerie Mokum in Amsterdam, Sugarlift in New York, and Danese/Corey. She has received multiple Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grants, the Avigdor Arikha Memorial International Residency Scholarship, and the Artist's Magazine All Media Grand Prize.
In her Visual Arts Passage guest lecture, Frank walks through her working process in real time, from first marks to finished surface. What follows is a breakdown of the ideas and methods she shared.
Summary
Zoey Frank builds paintings through perceptual observation, recording how light actually hits the eye rather than how the brain categorizes objects. Her process starts with a loose underpainting, then develops through constant revision of value relationships and pictorial space. She treats composition as directorial staging, guiding the viewer's eye through deliberate contrast, overlap, and color placement. For emerging painters, her approach offers a framework for developing a personal visual voice grounded in observation rather than formula.
How Perceptual Painting Actually Works
Frank's paintings begin with an underpainting: a thin, fast layer of color that establishes the basic layout without committing to anything final. This is not a careful drawing. It is a loose map of where the large shapes fall, a foundation built to be painted over.
From there, the work becomes perceptual. Instead of painting what she knows an object looks like, Frank paints what she sees in that specific lighting condition at that specific moment. A white plate under warm afternoon light is not white. It is a series of warm and cool value shifts that her eye registers before her brain has time to label them. The discipline is in recording perception before cognition overrides it.
This requires breaking visible forms into planes: the angled surfaces where light changes direction. Each plane catches light differently, and the relationship between adjacent planes is what creates the illusion of three-dimensional form on a flat canvas. Frank adjusts these relationships constantly, pushing values lighter or darker, warmer or cooler, until the spatial depth reads correctly.
The revision is the process. In her own writing, Frank has described leaving traces of earlier states visible in the finished surface. Past positions of objects, abandoned color choices, and structural shifts remain embedded in the paint. The painting records its own construction.
Staging a Scene: Composition as Direction
Frank approaches composition the way a director stages a scene. Nothing is random. Every object, every shadow, every color temperature is placed to control how the viewer's eye moves through the image.
Her subjects are often deliberately ordinary: kitchen countertops, studio tables, cluttered living rooms. She has said that the ordinariness forces her to make compelling images without relying on the power of the subjects themselves. The composition, the value structure, and the color relationships have to carry the work entirely on their own.
Composition Principles from the Lecture
Value contrast Place your strongest light against your deepest dark where you want attention first.
Lead-in lines Use table edges, cast shadows, or the direction of a form to point the viewer toward the focal area.
Color as anchor A single warm note in a field of neutrals will hold the eye. Frank experiments with this deliberately, sometimes keying entire paintings around a single color.
Overlap Placing one form partially in front of another is the simplest way to establish spatial depth on a flat surface.
These are not rules she follows mechanically. They are tools she uses to solve specific problems in specific paintings. The consistency is in the rigor of observation, not in a fixed formula.
Developing a Visual Voice
Frank's career offers a useful case study in how a painter moves from technical competence to personal expression. Her classical training gave her fluency with traditional methods. Her MFA pushed her toward contemporary theory. The tension between those two influences is visible in the work itself: paintings that are formally rigorous and historically informed but that refuse to settle into a single predictable approach.
She has described a pattern of working against her own tendencies. When friends teased her about her neutral palette, she responded by making a series of bright color studies with construction paper and saturated objects. When she felt constrained by linear planning, she started painting from direct observation without any preliminary setup, letting the composition emerge from how objects moved through daily use.
This willingness to destabilize your own habits is central to her advice for developing painters. A visual voice is not something you decide on in advance. It is something that emerges from sustained experimentation, self-awareness, and the accumulated weight of decisions made across hundreds of paintings. Programs like the Skill and Style for Gallery Art course at Visual Arts Passage are designed around exactly this kind of long-term development.
What This Means for Your Own Practice
Frank's process is not a formula to copy. It is a demonstration of what happens when observation becomes the primary tool and everything else, including style, follows from that commitment.
Three things you can take from her approach immediately. First, practice seeing value relationships before you pick up a brush. Look at the objects around you and ask what is actually lighter and what is actually darker, ignoring what color they are. Second, paint the same subject more than once. Frank paints mundane objects repeatedly, studying how they change under different conditions. Third, leave room for revision. If your process does not allow you to change your mind, it is too rigid to produce honest work.
Her Instagram (@zoeyfrank) and her website are good starting points for seeing how these ideas play out across a body of work.
Zoey Frank is one of the free on-demand lecture speakers available to all Visual Arts Passage students. Learn painting from working professionals in live mentorship courses.
View Fine Arts CoursesFrequently Asked Questions
What is perceptual painting?
+Perceptual painting is an approach that prioritizes direct observation over conceptual knowledge. Instead of painting what you know an object looks like, you paint the specific light, color, and value relationships your eye registers in real time. Zoey Frank's work is grounded in this method. Her paintings record perception before the brain has time to simplify or categorize what it sees.
Where did Zoey Frank study painting?
+Frank completed four years of classical atelier training under Juliette Aristides at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, then earned her MFA from the Laguna College of Art and Design. This combination of traditional technical foundations and contemporary critical theory informs the tension in her work between rigorous observation and experimental pictorial space.
What subjects does Zoey Frank paint?
+Frank works across still life, interiors, and multi-figure compositions. Her subjects are often deliberately mundane: kitchen countertops, studio tables, cluttered rooms. She has said that the ordinariness forces her to rely on pictorial space, value structures, and color relationships rather than the inherent drama of a subject. More recently, she has been working on larger multi-figure paintings that draw directly from art historical compositions.
How does perceptual painting differ from photorealism?
+Photorealism reproduces the surface appearance of a photograph. Perceptual painting records the live experience of seeing. The result is often less polished than photorealism but more spatially complex, because the painter is working from the shifting, imperfect conditions of direct observation rather than a frozen image. Frank's paintings frequently carry visible traces of revision and earlier compositional states, which a photorealist approach would eliminate.
Where can I see Zoey Frank's work?
+Frank's work is represented by galleries including Galerie Mokum in Amsterdam and Sugarlift in New York, and has been shown at Danese/Corey and the Haynes Gallery. Her website (zoeyfrank.com) and Instagram (@zoeyfrank) document her ongoing studio process and recent exhibitions.