Ian Francis

May 31st, 2009

Once more we try to broaden our scope beyond what’s supposedly to be expected from us and contacted Ian Francis (www.ifrancis.co.uk) simply because we saw his work somewhere, checked his website and liked a lot what we saw. His visual universe seems familar to those of us that grew up watching TV, reading comic books or going to the movies in the second half of the 2oth century. His work is on the way of becoming increasingly pricey and in our opinion not without merit. Here’s the interview:

First of all: Why, where, how… did you become an artist?

I’ve loved painting and drawing for as long as I can remember. I think I decided I wanted to be an artist when I was about 11 or 12, and since then it’s what I’ve been aiming for. I studied Illustration at university because I felt the course was closer to what I wanted to do than the Fine Art course was at the time, but I was always more suited to doing my own work than working to a brief. After I graduated it took me a long time to get into doing art full time, I knew it was what I wanted to do but had no idea how to go about doing it as a career. I spent about 5 or 6 years doing part time jobs to pay the bills and spending my free time trying to develop my work. Eventually, I started getting asked to submit work for exhibitions at a few different galleries who’d seen my work in online or print magazines.

It looks like your personal iconographic universe has a lot to do with TV, movies, maybe comic books. These are all primarily narrative arts. Because of this and because of the titles of your paintings, it feels like there’s a sometimes underlying and sometimes even obvious narrative intention in your work. Would you agree? Do you like the idea of people seeing a story in your paintings that goes untold, of the paintings just being a hint at a more complex plot going on with those same characters?

Yes, definitely. I love film and TV, and I love the relationship that painting and drawing has with them - in film, frames go by so fast, and come together to make the whole, whereas with painting you’re taking something that’s a few seconds or just a fraction of a second and arresting that moment and spending days/weeks/months portraying it. At the moment I’m not interested in creating extended story-based narratives, but I love the idea of an implied narrative that’s created by a static, two-dimensional picture. I love trying to pair things down to a moment that fascinates me.

As you might have noticed we interview, exhibit and work with many different artists but a lot of them come from a Street art of Graffiti background. It doesn’t seem to be your case but your two major solo shows so far have been at 2 galleries in the US and the UK that also seem to pay a lot of attention to these same kind of artists. Would you say you have anything in common with the whole Street art thing and artists that are labeled as street artists? Maybe not so much with this in particular but with other artists in your generation that don’t quite fit the standard (”Outsiders” as Steve Lazarides puts it)?

Something I guess I’ve always struggled with is where my work fits in. When I graduated I knew I wanted to do artwork about whatever I felt like, so illustration wasn’t for me, but the only gallery work I knew about was either very high-end conceptual work or extremely conservative traditional work, both of which I have a lot of respect for but don’t really move me. I knew the kind of work I wanted to do, so I just got on with doing it and tried not to worry about its place in the world. Lately I think maybe it’s a good thing for me not to fit too neatly into a genre or field. I like Street art, but my work doesn’t really have that much directly in common with it, and in some ways it’s the antithesis of it (it’s built up over layers and time which I guess is the opposite of the immediacy you need with Street art). I think the link comes from being on websites like Fecal Face, Juxtapoz, Beautiful Decay etc. that tend to cover both. I think maybe the similarity comes from a shared sense of just loving artwork and imagery, and wanting to get on with it. I like the fact that a lot of the work in these types of galleries or websites is really trying to engage with people in a way that some more traditional galleries don’t seem to, but maybe that’s just my perception. They feel more relevant to me.

I can’t really tell by your art if your vision of life is a pessimistic or an optimistic one but the combination of dramatic or even tragic situations, monsters even! with the often vividly colorful backgrounds or the sarcastic titles makes it seem a lot less somber. How would you define your art in terms of mood, optimistic vs. pessimistic, comic vs. tragic…?

I think that, despite all it’s failings and my own ingrained cynicism, I love the society I live in, and I don’t want to see it fall apart. The idea of things collapsing and being destroyed fascinates and horrifies me, and it’s become a dominating theme in my work over the years. The way that such a disparate range of ideas, from the very serious to the utterly superficial, sit side by side and link together on the internet or in popular culture really strikes me. I guess it’s this sense of horror and absurdity and beauty mixing together that I’m trying to get across in my work. I think the world’s getting stranger by the day, and it’s hard to really know how to react to it sometimes.

Going back to the monsters, I’ve noticed that a couple of your recent paintings portrait monsters, or at least that’s what the title says, but the monsters seem part of that looser style that dominates your landscapes as opposed to the more defined and detailed technique you use for human characters. Do you think you’ll be getting more specific with your future monsters or they’ll remain blurry and therefore more mysterious and scary?

It comes from a sense of abstract threat that seems to underlie a lot of what I read and see these days. A lot of the dangers we face are very real, but they’re not necessarily immediately obvious in every day life, and they don’t really have literal physical forms. There’s something about the idea of a monster, at least in an abstract sense, that appeals to me, I guess it’s the mix of the seriousness and the ridiculousness of the situation. The actual abstract shapes themselves tend to come from the light effects and distortions you get in photography, particularly in pictures of things like explosions and buildings falling apart. I want to try and bring this idea into the paintings subtly, using shapes and forms that are suggestive of things which recur constantly in news footage.

I would like you tell us about your creative process and particularly how’s the balance between the process and the result. Anything is good as long as it takes you to the desired objective or precisely is the process what makes it worthwhile and the result is just an expression of that process? Can you elaborate on this, please?

Process is very important to me, and I try to use different techniques and media to get them to play off of each other in a way that’s relevant to what I’m painting. Sometimes I love spending time painting something fairly delicately and then obliterating large parts of it with either very loose brush or palette knife strokes or just pouring paint directly on to the canvas. When I’m working on ideas, I usually come up with ideas for images rather than ideas specifically for paintings, which can be good in some ways but often leaves me with no idea how I’m actually going to make the image into a painting.

Seeing it on a canvas where one’s perception is subject to characteristics such as the texture that identifies a certain technique, the size or the context (ie: an art gallery) must make a big difference when observing one of your paintings but seeing it on a computer screen your work looks very close to what could be considered illustration, something taken from a comic book cover, a spread page for some magazine article. And please don’t take it as a way of making any less of your work, I think that’s great!. The difference is probably that an illustration needs to serve the purpose of precisely illustrating something (the comic book, the article…) Do you feel liberated not having to serve any other purpose than taking your work wherever you feel like at that particular time? Do you have to find your own theme or story to illustrate for each new painting?

I definitely feel liberated, although I studied illustration at university I have never been any good at actually illustrating anything. I always paint whatever I’m obsessed with and I just want to try and get across how I feel about a subject to other people. Sometimes I get frustrated with my work because I don’t feel I’m doing this well enough. I have a lot of respect for people who are good illustrators and can bring someone else’s ideas alive, I think it’s a real skill, sadly it’s one that I lack. The difference between seeing work on a screen and seeing it in person is interesting to me, particularly because a few years ago I was making finished work in Photoshop rather than on canvas. A lot of the paintings I make now are physically quite large, and there are some things with scale and detail that you can do on a large canvas that don’t really translate on to a screen, particularly a small jpeg. It’s a lot more immersive being able to stand in front of a painting that almost fills your vision. I think sometimes I’m not really an experienced enough painter yet, I’m still getting used to planning out compositions that work in relation to the physical scale of the canvas.

There’s a question that intrigues me from all artists in general and I wanted to ask you about: How much of your personal visual universe comes from your childhood? Is the kid inside of you a big percentage of who you are as an artist?

It’s difficult to say, I imagine quite a lot, but I think it’s a question a psychologist could probably answer better than I can. I had really bad nightmares when I was a child, I used to dread having to go to sleep, and I think dealing with that baseline fear has probably had a pretty profound influence on the things that I’m interested in.

What have you been working on recently?

I just did a show at the MTV gallery in Sydney and spoke at the Semi Permanent Conference in Sydney and Brisbane. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been taking a break from painting and instead just playing around with ideas. I’ve recently bought a new camera, and I’ve been messing around with it taking thousands of photos.

And any interesting project coming up that you can tell us about?

No, I want to take a break from committing to shows for a while to just play around with my work and try to develop it, which will take however long it takes I guess. Hopefully the work I do as a result will be interesting.

Some project you would love to do but didn’t have the chance or nobody has asked you to do yet?

I’m not sure… it might be interesting to do something like work on a film, but I’m so used to working by myself I don’t really know how well I’d get on working in a group project like that.

How’s a day in your life?

Lately I’ve been keeping really bad sleeping/waking hours, but ideally, I get up in the morning, go to the studio and paint, then go and meet up with friends or read in a coffee shop in the afternoon, then paint again in the evening/into the night. When I’m working more on ideas rather than painting, like at the moment, my work schedule gets pretty messed up, sometimes I seem to do almost nothing in a day and feel pretty bad about myself, but if I come up with a couple of things I guess it works out. I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and watching films lately, which is all part of the process.

Can you turn us on to some artists or something interesting that we should know about?

Artists: Fuyuko Matsui, Anna Conway, Alex Kanevsky, Ricky Allman, Yang Shaobin, Kristine Moran, Hung Liu, Rosson Crow, Bruno Dayan, Cai Guo-Qiang and Julia Fullerton-Batten.
Some books I’ve read lately that I really liked: “House of Leaves” (Mark Z. Danielewski), “The Boat” (Nam Le), “Remainder” (Tom McCarthy)
Some films I’ve watched lately that I really liked: “Last Life in the Universe“, “I’m a Cyborg (but that’s Ok)“, “Suicide Club“, “Survive Style 5+“, “Kamikaze Girls“, “Funky Forest: First Contact“, “2LDK“.

Entry Filed under: Artists