Frank Wimberley Ramble

Painter Frank Wimberley was born in Pleasantville, New Jersey in 1926. He currently resides in New York City and Sag Harbor with his wife, Juanita, where he continues to work.

Frank Wimberley studied with James Porter, Lois Mailou and James Wells at Howard University. While studying at Howard, he played jazz which led to a friendship with musicians such as Miles Davis, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter.

Wimberley describes himself as an Abstract Expressionist, an artistic tradition established over sixty years ago in the Long Island studios. Wimberley applies his paints shade by shade, brushstroke by brushtroke, to create what he has termed a, “controlled accident.” Wimberley slowly arrives at a composition of overwhelming color, endless depth, size, and palpable texture that demands an emotional response from the viewer. Evoking both John Coltrane’s surging sheets of music and Miles Davis’s delicately woven tapestries of sound, the paintings create labyrinths of melodies that effortlessly float to the surface and then are submerged in planes of movement, texture, and color. Creating a communion matching dispassionate intellect with wildly primal instincts, the works gain particular impact from their tones of thoughtfully cerebral ruminations that offer little overt narrative yet also never descend into incomprehensible or convoluted esoterica.

Over the years, Wimberley experimented with many forms of abstraction - as well as working with sculpture and photography - before attaining a style that, although it clearly follows in the steps of the Abstract Expressionists, is distinctly his own. He changed from oils to acrylic so he could see the end product quickly and then started to use a thick impasto. “I like using a big, floppy brush to get the movement in the paint,” said Mr. Wimberley, who also does a lot of woodwork, which meant that his small studio in Queens was always full of sawdust, “so I added the sawdust to the paint to give it more body.”