Ian Francis

Ian Francis was born in 1979 in Bristol, England, and graduated from the University of the West of England with a degree in Illustration. His work concentrates on the particulars of modern experiences — things like television, world events, celebrities, and day-to-day living. He held his first US solo show at BLK/MRKT in 2007.

He spends a lot of time watching TV/films, reading books and looking around the internet... He saves loads of photos he finds interesting from all kinds of different places. He then flicks through them, and try to think about how ideas link together, and mock up roughs in photoshop. He likes combining different elements of photos of people with abstract sections of old paintings I've done. Once his got an idea of what he wants to do, he’ll try and figure out how to paint it... sometimes the final piece looks a lot like the rough, sometimes it changes drastically while I'm painting it. When I'm painting, I just switch back and forth between paint, drawing, collage or anything lying around.

He normally describes what he does as mixed media painting... the idea is to get different kinds of marks to work off of each other - so sometimes he'll paint/draw fairly accurately, then work quite loosely on a section, then break up elements of print on another section. At the moment he thinks a lot of the painting he does is too tight, “it should really be looser and more expressive”.

He also relies on his friends to come up with interesting things to do, because he’s been working a lot lately so he’s pretty boring right now (or, always)... he’d probably involve getting very drunk and going to a club to see a genre of music that ends in 'core'.

What he is really excited about now is, Lost season 4, going to All Tomorrow's Parties to see Portishead and various other people, and hopefully having a bit more time to work on some paintings for a show next year... there's some ideas that I'd really like to get down on canvas.

He is usually most productive at night, although his schedule's pretty random... He does artwork pretty much every day, but it can be anything from less than an hour to about 10 hours.