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Born: 1981 Palo Alto, California
Lives and works in San Francisco, California
Artist Statement about the Kubla Khan series
Xanadu: Broadway musical, surfboard shaper, Rush hit and more, this word evokes many things to many people. To me this has been the focus of the past three years of my life: "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge acknowledged in his private journals that he wished he could paint to explore the lands of the imagination that cannot be expressed by language, "Were I a painter I would give outward existence to this, but it will always live in my memory." He also might have empathized with the philospher Wittgenstein who wrote, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
My own language is composed of brush strokes not words. I have taken the bones of the great poem "Kubla Khan", and I have made a series of paintings corresponding to the words of the poem. Through this process I have contemplated subjects such as Greek Mythology, Marco Polo's Travels, Milton, the femme fatale, and the Northern Lights. I have thought about music composition, war, and the prophetic nature of honeydew. Through the visual exploration of Xanadu I have created 56 paintings manifesting my journey. Coleridge wrote an amazing symphony of words, and all I did was listen. Thank you.
Education
2004 BA French Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
2004 Woodshole Oceanographic Institute, Sea Program, Studied Halo zooplankton
Books
2008 Kubla Khan, poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, illustrations by Alexandra Frank
2005 Resting in the Green, written and illustrated by Alexandra Frank
