“I still can’t make an abstract painting!” Frank Trankina jested a little into our conversation at his studio. As I took my first looks at monumental displays of paintings within paintings, whimsical toys fantastically collided with art history. In one, Arnold Schwarzenegger ganders at quasi-Barbara Hepworth and Constantin Brancusi sculptures; in another, fictional history paintings glaze imaginary mansions; in another, post-modernist paintings are dogged in a sterile white-cube gallery; in another, superimposed limestone portraits cascade textiles rife with trade; further along, Godzilla is monumentalized in a still life.

        Fleeting tokens, soaked in potential energy, are ready for realization in Trankina’s work. The seeming detritus of play—bobbleheads, action figures, folksy objects—stand resolute, poised to be immortalized in these still lifes. Trankina’s practice sleuths the quotidian and transforms it into wink-wink paintings that question performance within art spaces: where the limited space for playfulness daggers into the experimental

        Trankina’s studio’s large windows could easily produce greenhouse light in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood. He haphazardly installed coverings to mask, demure, and dramatize, cocooning his production space. Free-standing spotlights punctured a cacophony of excavated ephemera, oil paints, and in-progress paintings. Darkened in the far back left were bobble-heads, a lizard ceramic head, toy superheroes, and other unidentifiable characters from an origin story that is perhaps, only a memory of a memory. A scrap area shyly slumps in the back-right of the studio: cardboards, woods, textiles, tapes. The centered performance stage is a statuesque easel marred with paint. Remarkably organized brushes in canisters and oil paints with all their caps securely fashioned are ready to produce. It’s an academic approach, I will say: Trankina is a professor at Northern Illinois University in painting. The ethos of a clean studio is on full display. The necessities of painting from life are all around, although with some irreverence.

        But whether it is Schwarzenegger or a 17th century Dutch still life as inspiration, he combines the academic with the wistfully playful.

        With his healthy respect for painting techniques and lineage, it is apt to begin with Trankina’s training. His mentor Ray Yoshida, a prominent Chicago Imagist, nurtured his burgeoning collecting process of toys and secondary market objects. “I was lucky enough for him to become my friend,” Trankina said in an interview. He began collecting figurines and folk objects from Midwestern antique, thrift, and flea markets, even before he arrived at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 1992). Then in graduate school, he and Yoshida probed the street markets: soon realizing collecting vernacular objects could integrate into his paintings. Trankina believes it is a remarkably Midwestern experience to claim these sources— in opposition to attitudes on the East Coast at the time. “We were kind of outcasts,” Trankina said. Jim Nutt even took years to make an impact in the New York City scene, along with other imagists to “see their day in the sun,” he said. With fond memories of Roger Brown, Barbara Rossi, and other founding members of the Imagists, Trankina remarked on an “honor of his lifetime”: his work joined the Kohler Foundations’ “Ray Yoshida’s Museum of Extraordinary Values” exhibition, and after, their permanent collection.

        Among these sources, Trankina had the “cheap seats” subscription to the Chicago Opera in the 90s. Jim Nutt always played Operatic scores during his classes at SAIC (“they’re always rather long,” which was necessary for the long studio days, he said). When I remarked on the categories of Opera’s he witnessed, we jumped between comedy and drama—making light of versus making solemnity of.

        In the incidental sourcing of the conceptual and aesthetic, Trankina always returns to recreation married to a disciplined realism (although Trankina laughed later that he’s not even sure what “realism” means in its overuse). “That’s the play, the play” Trankina said, as he gestured to the figurines, “and serious play.” The duality of the serious and whimsical humors his influences, I scribbled in my hard-to-read handwriting.

        While holding the toxic green, ceramic, lizard head, as we talked, I worried about a limiting comedic reaction to his paintings. I confessed my fear that humor critiques can tarnish an artwork. Really, it’s “irreverence,” Trankina said. I scrawled in my notebook: “paradox.”

        Trankina then interrupted: casting a yellow spotlight onto an in-progress work in the center of the room. Large, parallel, and flattened pink destabilized foreground, middle ground, and background in it. Drooping funerary flowers wreath a toy turned to face a blank wall. The dual godzilla silhouettes are dialectical pairs. A marble figure reminiscent of Hellenistic greek sculpture fades into the background of army-green (Trankina and I remarked, though, how much we both hate green).

        The painting is about “flatness,” he said. And it demonstrated a fear he and I both have when mentoring young painters: their unacknowledged luring into digital images as source images. It’s the painter’s job to do the translation of the real to the pictorial, we agreed. This disregard to sourcing can alter the painter’s mixology—something Trankina is hyper-aware of even in the history of still lifes.

        These battling painting techniques and subsequent mentorships are pervasive in painting history. Still-life painters have always been evolving as inventors of devices: the 1630s-40s Golden Age of Holland saw a twisting of the naturalism of their subjects. Soon more interested in illusionism, painters like Anthony Claesz II and Hans Bollongier drifted away from their predecessors. With fantastical light and drama almost reminiscent of baroque painting, they collaged disparate flowers and objects.1 This germinated from an earlier hodge-podge approach of creating small studies of different objects, due to economic and environmental concerns. In flower still lifes, many flora were perennials: and, as in with Tulipomania,2 highly prized and expensive. Painters would have to venture into the gardens of the rich to conduct visual research. The bourgeois commissioners of these painters often sought exotic and (an archaic term) non-western curiosities. Their prolific desire for luxury produced painters to make vases that could be displayed year-round.3 That dynamic punctured the ephemeral nature of chosen objects.

        Returning to the in-progress work before I left, Trankina asked: “Shouldn’t I know all the names of the flowers?” I remarked: “Don’t worry: some Erudite art historian or critic, years from now, will do that labor for you.”

        We laughed.