Frances McCormack is a Professor Emerita of Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute who’s work as an abstract painter draws on the history of gardens and landscape design. Her paintings are invented spaces or interior theaters that are essentially images of the process of growth and transformation within a contained space. Combining architectural elements and loosely interpreted botanical forms, the paintings hold a range of energies reflected through the natural world. The lush paint, the physicality of execution and the history of decisions are obvious and unapologetically optical. More interested in seduction than instruction or critique she is in pursuit of the marvelous.