Art Sync: Through Light And Shadow

Elizabeth Johnson: In John Thornton’s video, Larry Francis Is Philadelphia’s Most Enjoyable Artist, you mention growing up among model trains and planes. Do you think that makes you see reality as a sort of toy world? A place to play?

Larry Francis: Perhaps all art is a toy representation of real life. We lived over my dad’s bicycle shop. He built model airplanes (some of his own design) and train platforms with houses, landscaped hills, and bridges. My mom was always making centerpieces or other crafty projects. I drew things and took art classes in high school. Between 11th and 12th grades I sold my motorcycle to attend a summer art camp, where I did my first oil painting with the teacher’s paint. My parents bought Time Life books for me on American art and world art. My favorite thing was watching black and white movies on The Late Show. I think all this mixed together with the craft of making things.

EJ: What about folks wanting to talk while you're painting? Are they an interruption or do you enjoy the interaction?

LF: I do talk to people, it’s part of what I do. Art is for everyone. Sometimes, this keeps me entertained.

EJ: How did you come to put yourself in Divine Lorraine Hotel? Does story enter while you are working?

LF: That hotel has an interesting history. It was part of the set for the movie Twelve Monkeys. I liked the look of it, with the fenced-in field, and I wanted to paint a slice of the changing city. I added a man looking at the area where buildings were about to go up, and some figures walking along the sidewalk, but I didn’t like how they came out.

EJ: In the Thornton video, Loving and Painting Philadelphia, you say, “...this show is about daylight, my next show will be about night.” Do troubling current events influence your use of darkness?

LF: Over the winter break of my first year at art school, I did one somewhat successful night painting, Trolley Car on a Snowy Night. This subject related to the work of Edward Hopper and John Sloan (all the Ash Can School artists painted night scenes), and I have done night paintings intermittently since then. I did night porch paintings as a sort of summer subject in the winter. They required dark silhouettes of buildings, trees, a dark ocean I would invent, then brightly lit objects or people would fill the porch, which used bright prismatic color against a dark ground. I did do one painting related to the pandemic: a sunset, with dark walls and lit windows showing small figures playing music. This was after seeing pictures of people in Northern Italy playing music from balconies, when the pandemic was bad there.

LF: Certainly, my use of paint and color is quite different, but many artists give hints of directions to follow. For example, The Italian Theater, his group of performers at night, is a painting of interest, when you find yourself painting figures at night. His wonderful Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera and Gilles express fleeting happiness, which may relate his personal fragility. I saw a Rembrandt show in Boston a few years back, and it made me think of Method Acting. The figures in his drawings, etchings, and paintings, like “Method” actors, were intent on portraying real emotion. Rembrandt, from the moment of making etchings of himself grinning in the mirror, was focused on capturing the real look of human interactions. Artists like Watteau or Hopper are less wide-ranging in what they portray, but they do make convincing images of the life they show in their work. This has inspired me to do what I can from a mixed soup of influences, from the art of past and present, and the life around me.

EJ: I love the painting Fishing at Midvale for its jam-packed, rife-with-rhyme, composition. Are there days that you paint more accurately to life and other days that you favor invention? And is it the subject matter or scenery that affects this decision? Was this painting highly edited to make the composition telescoping and tight?


 

LF: Because these paintings are of actual places, they may have more weight. I think a real portrayal of modern life would include more paintings of malls. The sign Jay’s Elbow Room portrayed in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning was a spot I passed for years on trips up to New York, that I often thought of painting. I got up at 3 AM to go there and make some studies in gouache. I introduced some figures from other pictures. I love these small shops, which perhaps remind me of my dad’s shop.

EJ: I love the harsh sun of Salt Marsh. Did you consider adding figures but chose a feeling of desertion?

LF: People often recognize morning or evening in particular paintings; however, visually, they look much the same. The figure in Industrial Age was added as a worker responding to the morning bell, and as a note of color relating to the sky. I had a strong feeling about the figure set against the background of old industrial buildings with the row houses: in another era, this area would have been crowded with workers. In Ridge, the busy avenue just naturally called for populating, the notes of color helped with the rhythm of the piece.

Picnic at the Water’s Edge was painted in early afternoon because I wanted to capture sunlight coming through yellow leaves. The arrangement of clouds helps to give a feeling of light to the leaves. Over time, figures were added to give a feeling of arrival. Mad River Road uses fleeting light to illuminate buildings, against a cloud bank in the background of early morning fog, emanating from the river a block away. My goal is to keep finding new subjects to paint, in the city and elsewhere, with a beautiful sense of light and some bit of life.


––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)

edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)

November 2022