Francine Marshall

Loveable colors, painterly imagination, flexibility! These are my heartfelt aims. My realistic subjects are animals, plants & nature-scapes. And I delight in creating abstracts & fantasies. LOTS of art classes & a 25-year graphic-arts career fashioned the Me-of-Now. In realistic works such as 'Six Dogs' above, the foregrounds are as true as I’m able to paint, while the backgrounds are most-often abstracted.

I have two main Approaches:

#1: Taking many photos & drawing often, I select 2-3 favorites, interweave & alter elements, & transfer the composition to canvas. A gradual overall development of the painting follows, via 35+ thin layers of oil glazes & colors. Eventually (often months) I feel satisfied with every miniscule element. Finally a sigh of happiness, ahhh!

#2: With barely any planning, or following casual drawings, I plunge in fast with acrylics on a variety of surfaces, discovering what evolves. The result might be playful or messy & sometimes even passable as 'Art.' This allows for a variant of Csikszentmihalyi's FLOW, quite different from the laser-beam focus I need for the accurate realism & correct anatomy of Approach #1.

End-of-last, brief doing nothing, while contemplating my next painting’s possibilities … Our 2nd home in Chitwan, Nepal provides ample inspiration & material.

I will be participating in Open Studios 2021 during two weekends in October, double yay! Until then my Watsonville art studio The Paintbox, is Open By Appointment Wed & Fri between 2-6 pm. Snacks & drinks provided. Visitors are free to roam about this studio-house-garden filled with paintings and music, and entirely lacking in 'jabaradastee' (pressure). As we say in Nepal, Wel-come!