This Clemmons-based painter stepped away from his craft for a 30-year career in advertising — now his colorful abstracts are getting collector attention again.
by Liza Roberts
Clemmons-based artist Frank Campion brings a cerebral tenacity to his abstract explorations of color and geometry. The well-known painter works in a modernist showpiece of a studio attached to his house (a contractor likened the space to the spot where Ferris Bueller’s friend Cameron’s father parked his ill-fated Ferrari).
Miles Davis plays on a continuous loop, art books fill side tables, sun pours through a ceiling of skylights; there’s room for giant canvases and places to sit and talk. The floor is a mosaic of speckled paint, and so is he.
“He” being “Frank 2.0,” a “re-emerging artist,” as he calls himself (in writing, anyway), the present-day iteration of a Harvard-educated man who came to prominence as a young artist in Boston in the 1980s. Campion had collectors, critically successful solo shows and was in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Boston Museum of Fine Arts (where one of his paintings is in the permanent collection).
Then he became disillusioned with it, walked away and immersed himself for more than 30 years in a successful advertising career.
That’s what brought him to Winston-Salem, a top job at ad firm Long Haymes & Carr. “It was a great ride,” he says, “very creative.” But in recent years, painting has called him back.
From the beginning, color has been a main attraction. So has tension. Campion says he’s constantly intrigued by “the imposition of geometry, with its logical and rational right angles and parallel lines, pitted against a painterly catastrophe.”
His description of such a catastrophe sounds like the musings of a man in love with his work: “It’s random spills and splats, and drippy, sloppy paint. Thick paint, thin paint, rational form against random painterly incident. When I look at all the things I’ve worked on, that’s a consistent theme.”
Lately, it’s been hard work.
“Sometimes artists have this conceit that everything they touch is going to turn to gold,” he says. “The truth is that it rarely does. You have to make a lot of messes.” Campion says 2024 has been a year of “mucking about, cutting stuff up and putting it back together again.”
He made his Dichotomies series by taping off one side of the canvas and painting the other “until it looked interesting.” Then he’d cover that painted side with newspaper and go to work on the blank one. When it was complete, he’d unveil the full canvas to himself. “I’d have a vague memory of what the other side was like when I peeled the tape and the newspaper off,” he says. “Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not.”
Gap represents his current interest in “playing around with the idea of gaps and alleys and fissures; looking for a looser way of working. Instead of having two fields to work with, I’m seeing what happens in between them.”
To watch Campion paint is to witness intuitive creativity at work. Once, on a studio visit, he pulled a canvas to the floor and stared at it for a moment before tipping a bucket of paint onto its blank expanse. The paint was gray and viscous. It splashed indiscriminately, like muddy water. He studied it for a moment, then tipped the bucket again and again and again, finally picking up a broom-scaled squeegee to push and pull it back and forth.
As starry splotches became ghostly shapes beneath a paler scrim, this respected painter looked for all the world like a pensive janitor, mopping the floor.
The result, weeks later, belied those humble beginnings. Sharp geometry, deep blue, soft orange and acid yellow layered the gray-splashed canvas with subtlety and contrast, dimension and structure. Pieces of gray remained, muddying some of the bright shades, swirling in tendrils on the margins.
“I like color. I like emotion,” Campion says. “I like the collision of chaos and order.” What viewers see in his work includes all of that, he says, but also what they bring themselves. “Abstraction is a kind of mirror. It’s a challenge.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of WALTER magazine
