Colin McFrangos “hated every minute” of an advanced drawing class he took a year ago at the School of the Art Institute. He says he’d been making “pretty hermetic” prints, “spilling my guts out in such a coded way that no one would ever care about the work.” The drawing instructor, whose own art he actually liked, was interested in discussion, analysis, and relations between abstract shapes that, McFrangos says, “play with the figure-ground idea”–connecting objects with their surroundings–“a very specific framework that I was interested in breaking with.”
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McFrangos finds inspiration in the local music scene. His art tastes range from Goya to Schwitters to the underground “comix” of R. Crumb, but the differences so important to critics and academics matter less to him. “I don’t care if it’s a scrawl in a back alley if it engages me in some way. I was walking home one day and found on Division Street these two ratty socks, and just being me I picked them up and glued eyes on them.” This sock puppet now emits a weird green glow in a silk-screen poster for the band Come.
