Every first generation American child of immmigrant parents lives in some degree the shock, the alientation from family and the necessarily sometimes brutal struggle to translate oneself out of the parental culture without destroying familial bonds.
Ms. Frances, in her agony of escape and rebirth from child of immigrant Cretan parents into her life of American woman artist, offers through these drawings, as well as in her own very literate written report, the agonizing stages of this liberation.
She has created an original testament to the profound struggle required and to the everlasting power of art to convey that struggle in appropriate metaphor.
She took the ancient Minoan bull of her ancestry by the horns and rode him to the kill - to her resurrection as American woman and as artist. Brava!...
"'Cause suicide is painless. It brings on many changes. And I can take or leave it if I please. ...And you can do the same thing if you choose."
Like Suicide, Self Procreation/Re-Creation "brings on many changes," but it's hardly ever Painless, as Ms. Frances' gripping chronicle of her odyssey makes overflowingly clear.
The text is deceptively plain-spoken. Until well after the fact, I scarecely realized how deftly she conveys complex, elusive notions and feelings as if in a treasured letter from a dear friend.
As for the images, words can't describe them. Powerful, moving, disturbing, revealing, truthful, tormenting -- toss a stack of such adjectives into a hat and cook until you concede that words can't describe these drawings.
"Drawing It Out" is an enthralling exhibit of a Spiritual Epiphany -- "a sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something" (American Heritage Dictionary).
Don't read "Drawing It Out" unless you're prepared to risk the challenge of searching-out the Epiphany of YOUR Self... Pretty Scary Thought, eh?
The essential candor of the visions demands from the artist an equal openness in the text, so that the two potentiate each other, so to speak, like the gin and vermouth which become something else in a successful martini. It is powerful stuff.
And then, too, William Blake, a master in two media, comes to mind. The probing and the sharing of the inner workings of a human being are about as intimate as one can get, aren't they? And yet, the artist's own determination to give an honest portrayal allow the work to transcend the wrenching experience of it's raw, very raw materials.
I wouldn't have missed it for the world.