Lucien Frank’s Paintings Enliven and Surprise at Gallery 169

Painter Lucien Frank (right) as a child with his father, Patrick Loungway, in one of the iPad framed oils in his exhibit, Wing Walking: Since the River Took Emmy Lou. This painting was one of several new pieces added to the exhibit today.

By Laurel Busby

News & Information Editor

Aerobatics and iPads feature prominently in Lucien Frank’s Gallery 169 exhibit, Wing Walking: Since the River Took Emmy Lou, which runs through Wednesday.

From a distance, the iPads act as sleek frames, perhaps for digital images, but when viewers peer more closely, they notice that the images are analog—oil paintings encased in iPads. Frank, 24, who grew up in Rustic and Santa Monica Canyon, painted them on iPad interiors before reassembling the machines. The pictures range from intimate portraits of people to hands cupping a frog, but the iPad “frame” creates something extra that surprises and delights.

In the largest display room at Gallery 169, aerobatic-performing biplanes in circular frames dance around the walls amid larger paintings of biplanes. In addition, several paintings offer characters in evocative rural locales with a cinematic, storytelling quality.

Frank, who has worked in the camera department of big budget movies for his cinematographer father, Patrick Loungway, said those filmmaking experiences were inspirations that have affected his painting, while a photograph that his artist mother, Jona Frank, took also became a model for the adolescent boy holding a rifle and dead rabbit next to a 1920’s-era biplane in his central painting.

In addition, Frank found that pieces of the 1975 Robert Redford movie, The Great Waldo Pepper, with its post-World War 1 barnstorming aerobatics and death-defying wing walking filtered into the numerous biplane paintings in the exhibit.

“So many parts of that movie just stuck with me,” he said of the movie’s individualism and trick flying. “Each of these pilots are existing in this world separate from everyone else, where they're touching down in farm fields and … getting all the local people to come out and watch their shows. It just stuck with me.”

Influences, though, are a complicated topic for Frank, and his knowledge that his life experiences filter into his art has made him careful about the choices he makes. For example, currently he is a senior at UC-Berkeley, where he’s studying history, and he’s purposely chosen not to engage with the school’s art department.

Dorothy and Emmy Lou, an oil painting by Lucien Frank

“I think curating my own influences and even just the people I talk to and the things that I see day to day is a creative expression,” Frank said. “I feel like painting is this sacred thing to me that I have to protect at all costs.”

He’s also discovered that enriching life experiences are vital to creating a balance with the amount of time that he spends alone creating his work. Berkeley has been a good space to provide that balance through exploring ideas during lectures, while also watching the students type their notes or do something unrelated to class on their computers as the professor talks.

Santa Monica College, where he studied for his first two years, also is a place he cherishes. He happened upon the strengths of the community college system after graduating from Crossroads in 2020 without a clear direction. SMC allowed him time to develop that direction, while also offering him the freedom to take online classes as he worked on his father’s movie sets. He wishes more juniors and seniors were aware of the many benefits of community college.

“The community college path is not presented in a level playing field with any other college path,” Frank said. “You have this insane pressure to go straight to university…. Financially, [community college] is just so much smarter. My entire college experience will end up being less than a single semester of the art school where I was accepted.”

Once the Gallery 169 show ends, Frank is venturing on a road trip north, and last summer, he and a friend crossed the United States on another road trip, which is partially detailed in an exhibit booklet passage by Monty Hamm. These experiences, like his college life and his time growing up in the Boca neighborhood of the Canyon, will likely emerge from his work in unknown ways in the future.

“That's the thing about being cautious of your influences but simultaneously giving over to them and knowing that they’re going to creep in there anyways,” Frank said. “There's a whole world of things that influence me and … things that are just inside of me that are going to affect what I make.”

Wing Walking: Since the River Took Emmy Lou will be on display through Wednesday from 9-5 or by appointment at Gallery 169 (169 W. Channel).

A wall of oil paintings in iPads at Gallery 169.