Frances McCormack’s lush canvases make reference to places in nature; a forest, a garden, a tree, but their purpose is to evoke in the viewer a keener awareness of growth and decay, spontaneity and restraint, the persuasive and the implacable.About her work Kenneth Baker has written: “ Drawing divides, even when she does it with a brush, while her lush, loosely bounded painting draws us close. Passages of pure painting offer themselves materially as touchstones for the uncertain and inconsistent inklings of scale given by drawing. Color burns here with associative power, there it stands it’s ground as abstraction.”(S.F. Chronicle October 13, 2007)

McCormack was born in Boston and received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. She is Associate Professor in the Painting Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. McCormack was the recipient of the first SFAI faculty residency at the American Academy in Rome, three Buck Foundation individual artist grants and a Djerassi Residency. McCormack's current collaborative project,Portraits in Sound: with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble premieres September 1st, 2012 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The work explores the interplay of music and visual arts, featuring Kurt Rohde’s new work, Artifacts, with projected images by painter Frances McCormack and text by writer Sue Moon.