How sure are you of what you see? The French phrase entre chien et loup (between the time of the dog and the wolf) refers to the hour after sunset when the sky darkens, and friend can merge with foe and truth with false. Half hope, half fear can fill our hearts as objects become their own shadow. It is the moment of transformation when the werewolf emerges and fairies dance.

But it can be any time of the day and any phase of the moon . . . whenever real and unreal shadow each other. It may even be what we wish to be unreal. It can be what is happening in Washington.

Like legends, Derek Franklin’s second show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery traffics in mystery. As the show’s notice states, “In these paintings, [Franklin] continues his exploration of light and dark, clear and obscure, and the way in which everyday objects become part of daily rituals in our lives.”

One of Franklin’s larger paintings at the gallery (TOS #40; not exhibited but available to view on request) illustrates those themes. My eye was pulled to the gentle brightness of the sphered bouquet in the lower right. Yet, two dark, brooding discs intrude from the left, and ambiguous shadows (of fruit and bowls?) float overhead. Natural processes are unfolding with a dose of human chaos thrown in. What is benign, what is a threat, what is to be trusted, what feared? The painting pulls you in while mind and soul toss those questions back and forth. Passive viewers need not apply.

Franklin is clearly attracted to disc-like spheres. Some direct attention while others serve to obscure. In his 2023 show at the gallery, these “spotlights” and “spot-shadows” often seemed to echo astronomic bodies, mythical moons and planets. I commented to Franklin that his current body of work was more like looking through a microscope than a telescope, but he cautioned me that they are not all that different. Either way, the sphere is prominent—though paradoxically, it may not be round. In TOS #36, it appears distorted as if the globe is being pulled apart, perhaps by our mind’s eye or a gravitational lens. That is to be expected from Franklin. Just when you imagine that you are beginning to understand, he throws a curve ball—or a curved ball.

Franklin is a deeply curious, questioning artist, searching for ways to address life’s unanswerables. Gallerist Liz Leach described him as a “heartfelt, idea-based painter.” As Franklin and I chatted in his East Multnomah County studio, he recounted some of the questions he has been pondering: “How do you talk about the things in this world that can be opposed to each other but both true?” “Where do ideas come from?” “What connects us, and what pulls us apart?” The questions are posed by the images. The answers, if they exist at all, may be somewhere in the stories Franklin’s brushstrokes tell and in his exploration of “light and dark, clear and obscure.” Franklin doesn’t make it easy.

Since he is a storyteller in a mystery world, and his brush speaks a visual language, he looks for objects and images that turn questions into stories. Often, that takes him to remnants from antiquity embedded with history, everyday objects that were once held and used as tools for life-sustaining, life-enjoying food or drink. Objects that exist now in ghostly form, like shadows, reflections, and echoes that once knew the touch of long-forgotten hands. These are their stories, as in one of the smaller paintings in the show, Constructing a World in a Predetermined State #2:

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For source material, Franklin has assembled notebooks of images cut from archaeology journals and culinary magazines, perhaps an ancient water pitcher or a roasted chicken. The starting point for a painting is often a layered collage-like medley of these images.

As he conceives of a painting, Franklin may pull a page from one of his notebooks and then cut out the images, isolating them as stencils that he holds up like a window to the past and future. He thinks of them as a screen and finds that by “cutting a hole in the screen, we can see what things are made of behind the screen, what is happening on the stage.” He calls them “apertures through which a background emerges,” focusing attention while simultaneously obscuring other parts. They serve much the same purpose as the spotlights and spot-shadows in many of his works.

We “exist with things,” Franklin reminded me as we looked through his image binders. “From the caves to the sand paintings of aboriginal peoples, art has always been about trying to figure out how to be human and alive, how to relate to things, to objects.”

Some of Franklin’s paintings, like TOS #36 and TOS #40 (above), are room-dominating. Many more are quite small, painted directly on concrete panels that serve as their frame, as in Constructing a World in a Predetermined State #2 (above) and Constructing a World in a Predetermined State #6 and #11:

Size matters to Franklin because “we see differently at different distances.” The larger works “make the space for you, a place for your body to be in, like a room where the viewer and the painting both move through the space.” The smaller works say, “focus on me, right here,” and the viewer experiences them “as if peering through an aperture from a secret room you are not supposed to be in.”

The distinction seems to echo the transition in his work from viewing the world through a telescope to viewing it through a microscope—with both views asking the same universal questions: Is this a reality or a facsimile; are we the viewer or the viewed? And that may be the point. Franklin doesn’t expect it to make sense. How can it, when he is striving to “see what we cannot know?”

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Between the Time of the Dog and the Wolf is on exhibit at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, 417 N.W. Ninth Ave., Portland, through March 1. Franklin will be talking about his work at the gallery at 11 a.m. Saturday, March 1.

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See Portland artist David Slader‘s Art Letters to subscribers here.