Francine Zaslow — The Palimpsest

Born the youngest of four into an art-filled home in a predominantly Jewish, West Hartford, Connecticut community, she describes wanting to prove her place in the family hierarchy. Both her parents had a keen eye for design which is confirmed in Zaslow’s studio where some of their mid-century treasures reside. Francine's mother was an exhibiting artist with a focus on assemblage and sculpture. Drawn to pursue the arts, Francine was admitted to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. There she was steeped in printmaking, sculpture, and dance.

Photography was secondary until, under the tutelage of Ray Metzger, she began shooting the figure, especially dancers and nudes. She thrived in this supportive environment and found her medium.

Zaslow’s layered exposure and experience playing in multiple mediums informs how she works as an artist. A most consequential event came on the heels of graduation when she returned to West Hartford and became a studio assistant. Free from school deadlines and college distractions Francine spent all her weekends experimenting in her employer's studio. There she contended with how to make her two-dimensional medium present as a sculptural one. The visual voice she tuned into was her own, free of outside influences, led solely by what pleased her sophisticated sensibilities.

Form, composition, balance, all formal art properties, were baked into her DNA. This concentrated focus on her craft undiluted by forces of style, trend or exterior confirmation laid an invaluable foundation for how she sees everything. Working with the magical element of photography, light, she taught herself to wield it like a welder. She mastered how highlight and shadow can elicit emotion.

A second serendipitous event was the landing of a global poster contract so commercially successful its royalties allowed her to relocate and open a Boston-based studio. She was afforded the financial runway to slowly purchase the camera and studio equipment needed for a budding professional. At barely 25 years of age, her next fortuitous career-building step was choosing a skilled representative to build her client roster. The trajectory of most entrepreneurial endeavors is a bumpy, winding and often isolating one. Being a woman in a predominantly male field brings its own obstacles. Life events including motherhood and ultimately becoming a single parent brought substantial hurdles to surmount.

Francine’s elegant visual acuity fueled her growing reputation to attract international brands. Her well-honed eye for beauty elevated all manner of objects — be it fashion, food, housewares, or beauty products. A most enviable orchestration occurred between initiating her self-expressive personal projects while tending to her devoted commercial clients. The renowned photographer, Irving Penn, exemplified such a generative artistic practice where personal work and paid assignments feed each other artistically and aesthetically — expanding inspiration and solidifying skills.

My career path crossed intermittently with Francines over three decades beginning with me as a stylist and wardrobe designer on set for a variety of her personal projects and commercial clients. I witnessed firsthand her exacting and meticulous process to bring her envisioned image to life. Cultural objects and forms of organic materials inspired her to craft sensual and textural tableaux as in her Afghan series. I curated Food Cycles, a 2010 solo exhibition at the DSI/Griffin Gallery composed of images of vegetables, fish and fowl that Francine crafted into sensual painterly still-life beauty. She added a sense of reverence to these objects of sustenance evoking viewers to consider the cyclical journeys of life, art and spirit.

Elements, her most recent personal project turned art exhibition, opened at Galatea in August 2024. Here Zaslow weaves fragments of memory, experience and emotion into tactile sculptural forms. Her 3-dimensional constructs are photographed and printed in lush detail. A culmination of all her art influences she began by casting bas relief vessels with objects organic and man-made. Figs, blossoms, twigs, pears, eggs, insects, bullets, muslin, flatware, and china are melded into assemblages that traverse time and honor transformation. Sensual and evocative, each vessel synthesizes Francine’s personal history with our shared human story — moments and memories, fleeting and fierce, beautiful and destructive. Figuratively she crafted womb-like containers melding artifacts of animals and nature suspended in their metamorphosis. Following her innate and intuitive process a confluence is created melding her imagination with reality — her own life events and those of our contemporary culture and society. Imagination like nature like life — each ceaselessly creating anew.