Influences

The artist Craig McPherson is an important inspiration. Formerly from New York City, he has large-format works in major museums and galleries around the United States and is one of the last acclaimed artists in the world working in mezzotint.

The patience, care, and detail he brings to his work has been a significant influence on Frances. His harbors of the world murals in the American Express building in New York are a constant reminder of his presence.

Karl Hartman is a painter whose recent solo exhibition, The Nature of Nature, was presented by Garvey|Simon at DFN Projects in New York. Working in oil on panel, canvas, and aluminum, he transforms familiar scenes — prairie skies, storm fronts, forests — into meditations on perception and the natural world.

Trained as both an artist and a geologist, Hartman approaches the land with close, almost scientific observation — a patience and attentiveness that resonates with Frances's own way of looking at the things around her.

Gabrielle Vitollo is an artist based in Brooklyn whose studio practice moves between painting, sculpture, and printmaking — blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, body and machine. Their work explores humanity's relationship with the environment.

A Fulbright research grant recipient in painting and printmaking, Vitollo works across traditional and digital media — a hybrid approach that has been a model for Frances's own mixed media practice.

Gary Schwartz is a New York painter who grew up in Coney Island and studied at the School of Visual Arts. His acrylic paintings combine pop hyperrealism with the sensibility of the Ashcan School — layering photography, digital collage, and months of careful painting into scenes that mix eras and places.

His process of rummaging through photographs, morphing them into compositions, and patiently building up layers of paint and varnish speaks to the layered, collage-driven way Frances builds her own mixed media pieces. He was recently featured by CanvasRebel Magazine, and his exhibition Boardwalk and Beyond showed at Taylor & Ponce Contemporary Art in New York.

Leah Umansky is a New York poet and collagist. Her collections include Of Tyrant(The Word Works, 2024) and The Barbarous Century (2018), and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series. She has curated and hosted The COUPLET reading series in New York City since 2011.

Her collage work — cut paper, photographs, and found images assembled into something new — is close to the way Frances builds a mixed media piece, layer by layer, until the fragments hold together as one image. Working across words and images also reflects the way Frances thinks first in pictures and then finds the language for them.