Since 1978 Dora Frost has exhibited paintings and works on paper and invented new ways of utilizing traditional pictorial mediums and materials to create exciting three-dimensional installations. In response to a recent question about the aesthetic underpinnings of her approach, Frost, who was born in Manhattan in 1951 and studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York from 1969 to 1973, is quick to speak about her passion for art-making as “an inquiry into the nature of reality”. Based in recurring interests in “illustration of the written word or of interior kingdoms” and “painting and drawing from life,” according to Frost, she has produced “two very different types of work”.

One type of work highlighting the powers of imagination, fantasy and memory is strikingly showcased in the series inspired by a rereading of Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time also known as Remembrances of Things Past. Frost envisions the series as an installation. Like the Proust’s seven volumes, Frost’s series-installation is lengthy and episodic. Already she has done 300 canvases of various sizes with more to come. Some of the canvases have been put together in collaged formats; others she lets stand alone. The final structure of the installation remains fluid.

Frost uses Madame, la Duchesse de Guermantes, the powerful female figure from Proust’s novel who resonates deeply for her “for hanging an array of ideas translated into visual experience.” Ranging from the artist’s view of women in society to her observations on female archetypes and autobiographical musings on people and experiences from the past and present, Frost uses “everything under the sun” as she puts it in making these canvases. However, while the language is representational the thrust of the imagery is not about “driving any point home or making a statement,” Frost says. “In the end, if it’s a success it should carry one further like an abstract does.”

Madderlake, the 1990s painting series and installation inspired by the music of Engelbert’s Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel opera and a production the artist saw at The Metropolitan Opera House, and the symbolic garden spaces encountered in the Eden paintings of the early 2000s are earlier examples of the soaring expressive heights reached by the work drawn from imagination.

The large pastels with gold and silver paint belonging to the Peonies Series are representative of the second type of work she does. The method applied in executing these brilliant colored compositions is one that “uses exactly what is front of me,” Frost notes, and goes on to say “I’m trying not to get myself involved in it at all.” Like the French Impressionists, Frost reveals how in objectivity and direct response, in the willingness to be “an eye”, lie the secret to capturing the abiding truths of nature’s beauty.