Patrick Francis is a prolific and successful painter, with a strong style and highly confident approach. His form of portrait painting employs methods used in times long past: a directorial approach in the studio, the deconstruction of the subject, bold and expressive use of colour, and an extreme simplification of the pictorial plane.
Francis’ use of colour recalls the intensity of modernist movements such as Fauvism and German Expressionism: stripping back an image to its main components, Francis directs studio assistants to select the exact colour required for each section, adding these to more detailed under-drawings. This selective process indicates that the artist places great importance on colour, its emotive value and the power it holds within the image itself. For Francis, colour is loaded with meaning: it holds the key to the characters he paints, conveying their state of mind, their roles and their situation to the viewer. Form and contours are flattened, becoming bright planes of colour. However, subtleties also exist in the edges of these colour blocks, gentle gradations giving way to sudden changes that catch the eye and hint at the hidden depths of perspective and detail within the layers of paint.
Patrick Francis places just as much importance in the selection of his subjects as in the selection of colour used to create them. His source material is found in images of art history classics, pop culture and film icons, and other mass media material. Francis also draws from facets of his daily life in Melbourne, and his sporting and community interests.
For SafARI 2014, the works selected by the curators are based on art historical source material, and include portraits of Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth, the Mona Lisa, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and a head from a Ned Kelly painting by Sidney Nolan. The jolt of recognition experienced by the viewer when coming across one of these paintings is quickly replaced by astonishment that the artist could capture the essence of such famous images with his deceptively reductive style. Francis’ deconstruction of the portrait is a way of seeking out the emotional truth of the subject: a search that distills the portrait into a purer form of representation, a portrait cleansed of its social and political implications. In Francis’ work, the individual’s essence shines through;engaging the viewer long after the initial shock of identification has passed.
Francis is a Melbourne-based artist who has been working with Arts Project Australia since 2009. His work received the Art & Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award in 2012, and has been shown in exhibitions nationally including at Arts Project Australia in Melbourne, Sheffer Gallery in Sydney, Tanks Art Centre in Cairns, and at the 2012 Melbourne Art Fair. In 2013, he was selected to participate in Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. His work is also held in a number of private collections nationally.
by Christiane Keys-Statham (SafARI Curator)